THE MADNESS OF DR. CALIGARI

by Dennis Weiler

  The giant twisted and turned to face him, bulging eyes and idiotic grin setting like wax, and then the giant split in two.

  Anger came closer with the gun shaking in both hands, skidded in the filthy slush and fell on his ass. The giant’s torso tumbled to land flat on its back, peeling away the overcoat. The legs turned and came running back up the alley towards him.

  Anger struggled to find his feet and point the gun. A sturdy boot came down on his face. He curled away from the attack. The boot kicked him in ribs and buttocks, then the heel came down right over his eyes. In the moment before he lost consciousness, he was frozen by the glimpse of the giant’s bottom half poised to deliver the coup de grace, the shrunken, armless fireplug of a half-man’s torso, the vestigial matchstick of a head, the faceless rictus sucking breath through a sphincter ringed with teeth as it kicked him into oblivion.

  ***

  “Oh, Herr Anger, with such specimens of Aryan puissance at work on our behalf, is it any wonder we’re losing the war?”

  Anger took the cold compress off his eyes and squinted unwillingly at the shadow looming over him. “Herr Wrasilde, as ever, you catch me at a disadvantage.”

  He looked around. He sat in the back of a long SS staff car. The blond, black-clad lizard beside him slowly, precisely peeled off a pair of black gloves so supple, they might have been made from the cured skin of a sub-Saharan infant. “I hope your explanation of the chaos you left behind at the clinic will be better than your stories were, when you used to get pinched for stealing bread.”

  “My civilian record is the tale of another life, my dear komissar,” Anger said. “This war has made the pure, ruthless new men the Fuhrer demanded, and fed them to a fire. Someone must carry on in their absence.”

  “But what a magnificent fire, Otto! Are you not ashamed to have outlived all your old comrades on the Eastern Front? Your hard-won skills made you invaluable to the General, but he is not so invaluable as one might suppose, these days, not true? Too many generals and not enough soldiers, perhaps…”

  “I fail to take your point,” Anger said, cradling his throbbing brain. “I had hoped to report an assault.”

  “Only one?” Wrasilde scoffed, offering Anger a cigarette. “We found a body, but it was shot with your gun.”

  Despising himself, Anger took the cigarette and sucked it to ash before he managed an answer. “I had no choice. Someone—this Dr. Kreislauf—destroyed his brain with a single stroke of a knife.”

  “Quite a useful man to have around, I must say. And then he escaped into the night, leaving no trace?”

  Anger tried to sort out what he remembered from the alley. The running assailant squirming and separating—the depraved, maniacal eyes—the faceless stump of a half-body, trampling his face—

  Wrasilde, premature silver hair framing a thin, angular face that reminded Anger of a seagull, put a restraining hand on his knee. Anger flinched when he saw the other hand go into his pocket. Only then did he notice the two men sitting opposite them in the dim compartment.

  “I find it quite hard to believe, actually, that even you could not get the better of him. This Dr. Kreislauf, we suspect he’s a mesmerist and a charlatan by the name of Caligari, who was not a young man before the last Great War…”

  “Why was he allowed to practice, then?”

  “Naturally, because his work has been of some use to the state. Even now, though I wonder if it isn’t only more noise and dust to further valorize our great failure. The Radio Werewolf broadcasts on the airwaves, exhorting the youth to rise up like the bloody berserkers of old and tear out the invaders’ throats with their teeth. The broadcasts, they have strange tones, noises, musical chimes, and such, that this Kreislauf assured us would induce the desired transformation.”

  “So he is another opportunist.”

  Wrasilde chuckled indulgently. “Take a walk in the outer districts, Otto, and tell me what has made beasts of the few boys we have left. Whether it’s this doctor’s good works, or just the return of the state of Nature.”

  “Maybe it’s the Fourth Reich, already being born.” Anger turned to look out the window. They passed a cemetery. A trio of men fled with a coffin on their shoulders as a mob of urchins in ragged greatcoats ambushed them from the gutters and tried to drag the coffin back into an open storm drain. Whistles and gunshots came from the field of headstones, but they sprinted away with their burden.

  “So he is protected?”

  “I have heard rumors that there is an asylum where the doctor keeps a human menagerie—halfwits, alcoholics, lobotomy patients, and so forth—that he’s mesmerized and trained into instruments of pleasure. No act is beneath them, for a price. Many of the Reich’s most powerful men have become ensnared in his net. I shouldn’t wonder that your General is among them. These men are not simply perverted, Otto. It is far more lethal. They are in love with women… Each of them obsessed with one woman, who goes by the name of Arora, or Anna, or Ada… always palindromes, yes?”

  The car stopped. Anger looked out with a knot in his throat. They were not at Under the Laurels, where Wrasilde would take him if his visit were to be permanent. He didn’t recognize the place. Half the street was gutted skeletons of old residential blocks.

  “I would like to be dropped off at General G_______’s headquarters—”

  “Ah, but that is exactly my point, don’t you see? Your General has gone missing, Otto! My sources say he was most agitated and desirous of a rendezvous, and when he could not raise his usual contact—”

  Frog! Damn, the phone was in his hands!

  “He left on his own, in a car that came to pick him up at Abwehr HQ. That one there, I believe…” Pointing out into the blue-white darkness.

  Nothing I have nothing am nothing

  Wrasilde handed Anger a short crystal cup brimming with brandy. “There is a tired saying the English are fond of… ‘The first casualty of war is the truth.’ Some war-weary correspondent coined it to shame men of war, but the truth outlives us all, not true? This war and the last one, the lies that were told, they fooled no one. ‘Take what you want, and if you can keep it, you deserve it.’ That was the truth we have taught the world, and they deny it at their peril.

  “However base your motivations—and we are still, after all, only a cop and a robber—I am confident you will serve the truth that is the last law of this land. I hope you get what you deserve, Herr Anger.”

  Anger tossed back the brandy, gagging it down and gripping his knees until the urge to vomit passed. His automatic was returned to its holster by firm, gentle hands. The chauffeur opened the door and Anger climbed out and looked around him as the Gestapo staff car sped away, back into the city.

  A field of strange hothouse flowers glowed with rampant color where they burst through the frosty ground. Lurid fields of Trummerflora bloomed up through the rubble nearly everywhere the Allied bombs had tilled the paved earth. None knew if they were sown by the bombs as another weapon of war, or long-buried seeds from before the last Ice Age, or some awful synthesis born of the rape of the earth by the sky. The General’s staff car was indeed parked out front. The driver lay on prone on the flagstones beside the open trunk. A small boy with long golden locks crouched on his chest and ate the driver’s face, while two older boys removed his legs with hacksaws. Swiss francs flew on the breeze. The cannibals wrapped the severed limbs in the canvases of a Van Gogh, a Cezanne and a Picasso and bore them off into the skeleton city.

  Though it had been bombed again and again due to its proximity to a munitions factory, the sprawling, faceless building was clearly a hospital, and by its sad decrepitude, he knew it must be for veterans. Anger crossed the cratered white lawn expecting to be shot by the figures watching from windows and holes in the blackened walls. As he drew closer, he knew them for department store mannequins, with sleek, perfect papier-mâché faces, tuxedos and ball-gowns and an
tique soldiers’ uniforms.

  A scissor barricade blocked the door, but it was rusted through, the lock easily smashed with the butt of his gun. White tiled floors furred with moss and dunes of wet ash softened his tread, so he had crossed the lobby before the mannequins drew tight their ambush.

  He aimed and shot the nearest mannequin in the face. It split, glue and paper, and a noseless Cyclops fell at his feet. They caught his arm, bent and bit his fingers until he dropped the gun, lifted him over their heads and bore him like a conquering hero to a feast.

  They went into dripping darkness, into catacombs where their hoots and unhinged howls resounded with the density of open-handed blows. Anger gave up struggling and tried only to protect his ears and vital organs. Before he knew it, he found himself stretched out and strapped down on a table in an operating theater, impaled on a spear of blinding white light.

  In lurched the awkward figure in cape and top hat. Anger said, “Caligari, I know it’s you… They know where the General went, and if you don’t release him…”

  The giant turned and hushed him. This effigy of Caligari had no lower jaw, just a scarred stub of a tongue pressed against a prosthetic steel hook. With its other hook, it reached out and set the needle on a spinning phonograph record.

  The hypnotic Italian Swiss voice purred out of the speaker cone, while the giant stalked round the table, pantomiming and mouthing the words as they came, a marionette whose strings stretched back into history.

  “Though our respective positions make it difficult to credit, I am the one who must humbly beg you for your understanding, and your protection. For I face the end of my natural span, yet my research must be perpetuated, my name must endure. I can easily reward your efforts on my behalf, for I have profited by my great work. History must know what I have achieved, and tremble.”

  The patient switched the recording. Anger thrust his hips and contorted his body. The brittle leather straps stretched and snapped easily, but he remained supine in the island of light.

  “Patient H.B. was remanded to me in 1934 for observation because of his deviant sexual obsessions… briefly treated this artist tormented by obsessive thoughts of finding or creating the perfect sexual partner, the ideal feminine object… He fled his homeland under charges of degeneracy by the current regime, but he proved the key to an entire field of research, to new games and bold new theories of discipline and control that have provided no end of knowledge and entertainment.”

  While he mimed, the effigy lurched round the shadowy theater and, one by one, windows of frigid light opened on the walls. A host of projectors hummed and threw lighted recreations of the same dim bedroom onto every wall.

  “As you can see, my mesmerism research combined with deployment of Dolls created for my specific purposes by Patient H.B. allowed me to not only explore, but direct and dictate the sexual pathologies of patients in my care… And in so doing, to move far beyond Freud’s regressive assertions regarding infantile roots of sexual fetishes, to observe as sadistic fetishes are expressed upon the state. I have entertained only the most extraordinary of patients, and gathered mountains of documentation.”

  In one film, a massive pig of a naked man bawled and suckled at the teats of a huge bovine doll against whose elephantine breasts he was a tiny doll. In another, a skeletal man with a rat’s face cavorted in a pool of feces with a golden-haired child strangling him with clockwork thighs. In yet a third, a chinless, doughy nonentity Anger at first mistook for the Leader himself, pedaled some kind of a stationary bicycle which turned wheels festooned with whips that raked his naked back and ass as he ripped and tore gobbets of spoiled offal from the groin and face of a Doll hanging by its ankles from the ceiling.

  In every room, the “patients” rolled and writhed in blind ecstasy like unto death. In one that had pride of place in the center, the Leader pretended to drink tea from a tiny cup at a table, then knelt before a magnificent doll and bowed his head to be urinated upon from a duct in the glorious Doll’s hairless plaster pubis.

  “Only consent to watch over my body of research, and you must see how it could protect and provide for the right kind of custodian unto perpetuity—so long as my work itself is continued… The world must know how the current regime has become my asylum, the nation my laboratory… and witness the realization of my most significant hypothesis. To wit—”

  The record ran out, the needle scratching at the loop in the center like a mechanical cat. The Doctor’s effigy came over to flip the record.

  Anger climbed down from the table with a stiletto he kept in an ankle sheath, and rushed to stab him in the kidney. He went to the phonograph and took the record off the platter. It was labeled only with a string of digits and a date: 3-15-39.

  The reverse side was blank.

  Good lord, six years gone. But whether Caligari was even alive and still in Germany, it mattered not. Somehow, this puppet theater of human wreckage from the war had gathered together a priceless library of extortion matter, but to what end? Perhaps, four years ago or even two, it might have had some value for a skilled extortionist, but now it was only a sickening historical footnote. And if even a sliver was true of the doctor’s insane boasting of having guided the Reich to its most demented extremes through his hypnosis and Patient H.B.’s horrible dolls, then he could exculpate all of Germany. It was all a mad doctor’s awful experiment, we would say. We were all under his spell—

  The spell that made us become what we are…

  He heard the chimes.

  And he heard weeping.

  Forcing his way past a series of vault doors choked with brain-dead human mannequins, he found the elaborate porcelain and glass coffin marked with the legend, ARORA.

  A naked, fat, faceless man lay across the coffin, weeping. His fingers were bloody burst sausages, the padlock on the coffin proof against his most desperate efforts. He looked up when Anger approached and Anger shot away his papier-mâché face even as the hideous doll pleaded and called Anger’s name.

  Next, he shot away the lock on the coffin, but when he lifted the lid, he could hear only the sound of its heartbeat.

  ArorA—

  Like her name, she was a palindrome.

  Lean but succulent legs, marbled with the last fat of puberty, gave way to voluptuous hips that cupped the ball joint of the thigh in a hermetic embrace. The swell of the pelvis, the discreet outer vulva yawned with the roll of one lazy, gimbaled leg. Above the hips, she tapered towards a tiny waist that seemed to vanish into a mirror so that he reverently reached out and braced himself for disappointment as he touched her beyond the place where a natural girl would have a navel, and encountered the spherical ball joint of her belly, a massive, elegant, frictionless universal joint, beyond which he found her other hips.

  Like a girl bisected—corrected—by a mirror at her central axis, ArorA had two sets of hips, genitals and legs; Siamese half-girls, connected at the waist. Her skin was powdered white alabaster perfection, like a geisha’s, the sublime gleam of porcelain, the suppleness of india rubber, of cured human leather.

  He rushed ahead of the posthypnotic chimes to mount her, stripping away his clothing with his knife to feel every inch of her against every unworthy inch of himself. Virgin and vixen, incubus and succubus, ArorA was everything he never found in the world, everything he could never accept within himself.

  Where she met his hips, he slid effortlessly into her, hard as steel and convulsing instantly in orgasm, triggering some wondrous mechanism when he pressed his tongue into her upper vagina so that a wood and leather dildo slick with his own fluids slid out of the posterior crotch to transfix his anus, so that he wept in tortured ecstasy into the anterior vagina until it inverted itself and telescoped to fill his mouth.

  While a blind man followed with a whirring camera, the half-men bore the moaning, rocking coffin to the surface and laid it in a crater they began to fill with wet
red earth, beside the dozens of others who had failed to rise above their own sexual death-wish and so defeat the Doctor’s brutal hypothesis.

  Alive long after the snow filled in the crater, Anger could hear nothing above the sounds of his own flesh against hers, and the ever-present chimes, and if he heard them, he didn’t seem to care a whit about the raid sirens. The hospital came down on top of his grave, but he had found freedom in the slaking of desire, and wouldn’t dream of escape. What was he looking for, when he tried to run? All he needed was here…

  What he had thought was freedom from lust was only the frustrated rage of a hunger for that which could never exist… but he had found it. Endlessly taking and being taken, rapist and victim, he contained everything, in the same way a glove turned inside out contains infinity.

  By any reading of the rules, he had won the game.

  The sleep research facility hides among the trees in the hills west of town, a squat cylinder of graphite metal rusting at riveted seams, resembling an abandoned water tank. At Conrad’s approach, black doors of opaque glass slide apart to reveal an inner hallway. The strangeness heightens his anxiety and uncertainty, but he can’t go back. He has nothing left.

  His intake interview occurs in a windowless room at the end of the entry hall. A large video panel reflects Conrad’s diseased face back at him, a barrier between himself and the interviewing nurse. He failed to get a look at her as he entered, so now he’s talking to someone he’s supposed to call Nurse V, and has no idea what she looks like. Conrad knows this shouldn’t bother him, but many things bother him that shouldn’t.

  “Conrad W. Snow.”

  He stares without recognition into bloodshot eyes, sunken into deathly pale skin lost in greasepaint shadows. The mouth moves in sync with Conrad’s mumbled words.

  “Thirty-nine. Forty next... Next Thursday? Anyway, next week.”