THE MADNESS OF DR. CALIGARI

by Dennis Weiler

  Something started feeling just a tiny bit off, so I nudged the runners on the film gate pressure plate. For good measure, I trimmed the carbons too. They were hot and ever just so slightly too close to each other. When I checked again the picture was in focus but I could see Don inserting what looked like a syringe into the back of Gen’s neck. On screen the bombshell Caligari was performing similar experiments on her mental patients. I was sweating more now, feeling extra-dimensional discomfort. When I looked again Gen and Don had gone, their seats empty.

  I decided to get some night air. The next part’s a blank. When I returned, I glanced at Walter as I passed the register. He stared at me and slowly peeled off his beard. Beneath was Wendy’s bare face. I pushed through the door and locked myself in the bathroom. After washing my hands several times I returned to the booth. The last reel was winding down. The credits were rolling and bodies were filing up the red carpet like zombies.

  Every single night I had worked at Cinemausoleum, someone had hidden in the dark after the show and frightened the pants off one or another of us. Sometimes Don, other times me. We all got each other constantly. In an old theater, there is no way not to freak out when someone grabs you in the dark. I decided then that Don deserved a good pants-shitting scare.

  After I had rewound the film, powered down the projectors and pulled dust covers over the lamphouse, I crept into the auditorium to wait. The lights were dimmed and I heard footsteps echoing down to where I hid between the first and second rows. One of Don’s jobs was to do the first sweep for garbage. We often found and shared open packs of cigarettes, half downed bottles of booze, jewelry, dildos, anything you can imagine. Well, we didn’t actually share the dildos but you know what I mean.

  Even with my pupils in total eclipse all I could see was the dark shape of his body. At the last second I lunged and toppled him. He screamed, collapsed beneath me. But the voice was wrong and so was his body. The lights came up as I clambered off and I heard Don’s voice from the hallway up by the lobby.

  “Everything cool down there?” he asked with that cheap smile that I now hated.

  I sprang up and dusted myself off. On the sloped ground at my feet was the old German. My first instinct was to curse him for ruining my scare, but his glasses were shattered on the concrete floor and he was collecting shards of lens in his wrinkled palm.

  “Oh man,” I said, swallowing my anger. “I am so sorry. Totally thought you were someone else.”

  He leered at me through myopic fog. His gaze burnt cold.

  “What I returned for,” he said with a grimace.

  “Can I help you out?” I asked with regret and confusion. The whole place was throbbing and I felt like I needed get outside as quickly as possible. He let me take his arm and we fled through the stage door with the dim red EXIT light above. In the night mist I felt my senses coalescing.

  “I cannot drive without my glasses,” he said when we reached his boxy little red Volkswagen convertible. “You shall drive me?” he asked.

  Motorsports did not seem like a good plan considering I was tripping so I began to back away from him. I wanted nothing more at that moment than to walk a block and hide in my studio and listen to Pink Floyd until noon the next day.

  “Listen man,” I said. “I’d love to help you, but I’m not finished with my shift.”

  “Perhaps we should call the authorities? Discuss my assault?”

  I stood in silence then took the keys that he handed me. From behind the wheel I asked, “Where to?”

  “Salem,” he replied.

  As we pulled out of the parking lot I could see the red and blue lights of police cars and an ambulance surrounding Genuine’s building. I hoped they wouldn’t follow us.

  There was no way I felt prepared to cope with the Interstate, so I drove slowly up Highway 99. Since Friday wasn’t a game night there was no one on the road besides the occasional log truck or car full of revelers heading home from their favorite roadhouse. People on those back routes love to use their high beams at night to spot deer, which fucked with my already drifting vision. Still, I kept it between the lines. We saw one hitchhiker but he was wearing something institutional and looked like he hadn’t bathed since Carter was in office.

  “So,” I asked. “What did you think of the movie?”

  “Scheisse,” he said.

  “That good?” I laughed. “Why come all the way down from Salem then?”

  “This is not the Caligari I thought to see. This is not art. It is a perversion.”

  “Well I enjoyed it,” I said with a smile. “But I can see how it might be disappointing if you were hoping for the pre-apocalyptic version. 1920 is a long ways off from the year 3000.”

  I drove on through the night down the smooth wet highway. The moon was waxing but had been new only a few days prior. The overcast skies rarely parted long enough for the slender moon to wink its evil dragon slit, then become obscured by clouds again.

  At one point I pulled over to take a leak in a field. The old man waited in the passenger seat. When I got back in he handed me an alcohol wipe before I touched the steering wheel. Except for me his car interior was antiseptic clean.

  “How about some music?” I asked. I took his silence for affirmation and drew the Carlos tape from my jacket pocket. The dark analog mono-synths calmed my nerves. “Timesteps” serenaded our nocturnal cruise.

  An awkward hour passed since I drove so slowly. Each small town was a crocodile pit speed trap for bored patrolmen. Eventually the city lights of Salem reflected purple on the looming cloud cover above. Driving into the capitol meant state cops, so I took each turn with extra care. The old man directed me toward Center Street.

  “You know this used to be called Asylum Avenue, in the old days?” I asked.

  “Ja,” he replied.

  Soon we rolled up on the decrepit campus of the Oregon State Hospital.

  I knew I shouldn’t have said it, but shrooms or no I was very good at speaking my mind. Before I could talk myself out of it I asked, “So, are you a doctor or an inmate?”

  He said nothing so I looked over to see if I’d offended him yet again.

  “Achtung!” he shouted and lunged toward me to grab the wheel. There was a sickening lurch as we piled into a parked row of cars and came to a sudden halt. The old man flew through the windshield like he had been shot from a cannon into the velvet night.

  When I woke up I was strapped down. The smell of bleach was overpowering and my head pounded. Cold winter light seeped in through the window. An orderly finally brought me a bland breakfast of powdered eggs and juice concentrate. He sat me up long enough to eat then checked my bonds. When I started scraping the tray with my fork, he left without answering any of my questions.

  Much later, the door opened. A voice said, “The Doctor will see you now.”

  “Great,” I said.

  “Not great,” said the orderly in a flamboyant voice with a bit of a lisp. “You smashed the shit out of the Cabriolet of Dr. Caligari. She is supremely pissed at you.”

  I was wheeled down long hallways that I recognized from One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest. I sincerely loved that film until I had to live here.

  The doctor had a thick German accent and jet-black hair with short bangs. She lit a cigarette and observed me like a cut of meat at a butcher shop or a lab specimen ready for dissection.

  “Is the old guy ok?” I asked.

  “What old guy?” she asked.

  “He was my passenger. I was driving his car. His glasses were broken.”

  “You were found alone, Mr. Custance. The car was mine. I do not appreciate you stealing it and I especially cannot forgive you for destroying it.”

  “Why would I drive up from Eugene by myself?”

  “Perhaps to flee from the scene of your dead girlfriend?” she said, exhaling smoke into my face. “Take hi
m away.” She buzzed for the orderlies who rolled me into the room where I’ve spent the last twenty-seven years.

  My new booth is a bit bigger than my old one. It has a porthole, a bed, and a typewriter bolted to a student-size desk. My stories are stacked to the ceiling in several piles. I write Hollywood screenplays, novels, poems, dreams, remembrances. I daydream about Genuine and my life outside the walls of the asylum. I write adventures for our games and sometimes I just crumple the paper into balls and try to choke myself on them or slice paper cuts into my eyes. Eventually they let me write again and I think if I tell the story enough different ways, it will eventually make sense.

  1

  Time is meat. At first its carcass is the bright red of dawn, accented with clouds of fat, offering seemingly boundless promise. It is sliced into fractions, and consumed in increments. But gradually it is depleted, and the portions that are not used are wasted, blacken and decay and become nothing.

  Time needed no face before there was anyone to observe and chart its coming and goings. Since there have been, often Time has come boldly and undisguised, its head a gold stopwatch framing a disk of raw red meat. Yet at times Time is masked, and passes on its way unrecognized on unfathomable errands.

  The people of Ephemera had long lain oblivious to the stealthy doings of Time. Long ago, they had become dissatisfied with their imposed and primitive biological existence. The dictates of belly and genitalia. They had devised methods of experiencing life and interacting with one-another in what they considered loftier and more meaningful ways, through the use of increasingly clever technology. They had supplemented and circumvented the body. Ultimately they had superseded the body altogether.

  The citizens of Ephemera had rid themselves of their obsolete husks of transient flesh, preserving only the most vital of organs—the thinking organ—in mechanical bodies, either cosmetically designed by themselves or by others whose specialty it was. No longer imprisoned in some random conglomeration of cells they had had no choice over, the citizens expressed their innermost beings, celebrated the beauty of artifice, and all this satisfied them for quite some time.

  Eventually, however, they again became disenchanted with existence. As their mechanized environment required less and less that they work, they spent more and more time idle, relaxing… resting… sleeping. Sleeping for longer and longer periods.

  Dreaming became their main source of entertainment, of comfort, of sustenance. Dreaming transported them beyond even their synthetic bodies, and relieved them of their frustratingly and perplexingly unsatisfying interactions with each other in the waking world.

  In time, the people no longer chose to wake, and what little needed to run in Ephemera ran itself.

  2

  For the most part, Ephemera lay inert and silent.

  The many dreamers reposed within their homes, those sealed-up dark pockets within the walls of Ephemera’s narrow streets and narrower alleys, all of which twisted and turned back on themselves like the convolutions of a brain. Over time, with the seismic shifting of the world beneath and the vagaries of the weather beyond Ephemera’s surrounding wall, the streets had warped and grown more radically humped, the turns of the alleys sharper and more abrupt. Sometimes an alley would gradually close up and become dead-ended, while another would slowly be pried open between buildings. The buildings leaned closer toward each other, touching foreheads intimately, or slanted away from each other as if contemplating their reflections in surprised revulsion.

  As mindlessly as a sleeper’s respiration, a variety of support systems continued operating, discreetly and furtively, as if afraid to cause the awakening of a single soul. To an outsider, though there were none, many of these sustaining functions and maintenance procedures would be inscrutable.

  At a second story level, metal wires crisscrossed some streets, and from a high compartment would emerge an object shaped like a bird of folded paper that would slide along the wire, come to a halt at the center point, open its beak and sigh a short puff of steam, then continue on the wire to a compartment in the opposite wall.

  Had anyone been awake to hear it, a tiny tick-tick-ticking would have announced the scuttling approach of a centipede-like automaton with a head like that of a child’s doll, only the top of the head was cut away off and showed a gaping empty space, this hollow meant to indicate that this mechanism was not the artificial body of a citizen of Ephemera but merely one of the custodians, who nevertheless themselves came in diverse forms. The centipedes would pause near an exhaust vent in the outer wall of a building where the moist exhalations of the sleepers within had caused black mildew to form, and the automaton would scrape this off with its bladed primary forelimbs, and with its padded secondary forelimbs polish the stained area white again.

  Up from hatches in rooftops crawled mannequins with those same gaping heads and pleasantly placid faces, their bodies garbed in satin harlequin suits, elegant spider-like legs carrying them delicately. They would sweep into disposal chutes the latest film of fallen ash and dead leaves blown in from outside the enclosing wall. They did all this under the absinthe green light of the sun, which had grown diseased over the uncounted years. Against the green-tinged sky, giant bubbles of gas-filled mercury rose from skewed smokestacks dispersed throughout Ephemera, drifting away to eventually burst and rain down quicksilver upon the forest beyond, toxic metal and gas wastes disposed of in one go.

  Another type of custodian rode through the lanes on something like a tricycle, its brilliant red paint blistered and chipped, the custodian itself painted red with a pointed head like that of a beakless cardinal, and from the seat of its tricycle it would reach out to scan the many large barcodes stenciled on the walls of the buildings throughout Ephemera, to confirm that it was making every stop on its endless rounds. Another barcode scanned, and onward it would pedal again, wobbly wheels squeaking softly.

  When they were done with their own particular cycle of chores, nearly all of the various custodians would return to their respective tiny closet, or oil-scented garage, or cavernous warehouse, to stand idle until the next cycle. Sometimes, standing there in the dark, they might twitch rhythmically or even go into occasional violent bursts of vibrating motion, because they were very old. Here and there, a custodian would remain fixed in place, never to venture forth on its errands again, because there were no custodians to tend to the custodians.

  3

  The primary component of dreams is longing.

  Dr. Phemorus dreamed repeatedly that the top of his head—which was that of a snowy-haired puppet with oversized glass eyes and skin textured like painted papier-mâché—had been sawed off like the top of a pumpkin. From the white-fringed crater of his open head would sprout a telescoping ladder, which would slant upwards and finally lean against the top of a great, blank wall. Though he couldn’t see it from the ground, he knew that on the other side of the looming wall was a forest with leaves of red, of scarlet and crimson and carmine, of cherry and blood and ruby. A beautiful autumnal forest that he had played in as a boy, picnicked in as a lover, wandered in as a thoughtful student. Shut out, now, these many years behind the wall that closed in Ephemera.

  In his long, long, unbroken chain of dreams, if occasionally he had wandered those forest paths again, once more in his original body of flesh and blood, again holding the hand of his youthful first love, or that of his second love who would later become his bride (his departed and mourned wife), then he might have been sufficiently content to go on dreaming. Even though he, Phemorus, had stridently warned the others, warned the Mayor of Ephemera himself, that it was a mistake to allow all the citizens to submerge themselves in constant slumber, to consign themselves to insentience. To shut down their conscious minds in favor of dreams. It was not natural, he argued.

  But what is natural? was the Mayor’s reply. Anything we can devise becomes an addition to what is natural. You, who devised the very body you now oc
cupy, talk of ‘natural’ like a frightened and senile old man from the time before immortality?

  The Mayor went on to say that all that could be achieved consciously, in the waking world, had been achieved. There was no longer a need to eat, to work, to struggle for survival. Now, proclaimed the Mayor, was the time for them all to reap the benefits of past labors, past sacrifices. Now was the time to cast off time. The dictates, the shackle of time, and of reality itself.

  We may yet achieve greater things if we remain awake, Dr. Phemorus argued, things that we can’t yet foresee or conceive of. How do you know we have no more to discover and accomplish?

  But the Mayor and the others of Ephemera wouldn’t listen to him—even though he, Dr. Phemorus, had once been considered a great man, the designer and engineer of the first of the mechanical vehicles into which all the citizens of Ephemera would ultimately transfer their minds, the artificial body that he now slumbered in being one of his initial prototypes.

  Then at least allow me to remain awake, and watch over the rest of you, to safeguard you, he implored. Who knows what enemies might come along and take advantage of us in our vulnerability? I will make the rounds and scan the barcodes, and see that all the systems are running smoothly.

  But no, the Mayor forbade it. He made a decree. Every one of the citizens of Ephemera must sleep, and sleep forever.

  You will regret this, Dr. Phemorus predicted vehemently.

  How will we regret it? scoffed the Mayor. We will be asleep.

  Somehow, someday, you will.

  There will be no someday. No days, nor nights. Only dream. Beautiful, blissful dream, as dream never existed before. Sweet, endless, and utter.