THE MADNESS OF DR. CALIGARI

by Dennis Weiler

  “And you?” the city editor asked, his voice light with an assumed offhandedness. “How are you in yourself? Your personal life?”

  I caught a glimpse of a white sink full of black water draining, the last remnant gem of black water warping through the steel hoop.

  “All over and done with,” I said.

  “And your prospects?” he said, his tone unchanged.

  I saw a black Spring dead ahead. I was going directly into it. A frigid, black Spring, like the rumbling of an organ descending ominously through huge minor chords, laced with the kind of editing cold that has sharp edges.

  “All hope, too,” I said.

  “That’s fine,” the city editor said, picking up his pencil and turning his attention to some papers lying stiff as frozen bodies on the bespattered slab before him. “You’re just the one this case is crying out for.”

  By the time I reached the street, night had fallen. Silent crowds sluiced through the narrow gaps between conical buildings, the pressure of tightly-wrapped bodies surging all around me, one half going one way and the other in the opposite direction. The streets here were made of wooden planks that shift slightly under pressure and the walls billowed as people scraped them. The motionless night air was close, and heat reradiating from the glass cones was trapped beneath the low ceiling of clouds that billowed as people scraped them. Something was frantic about people in the street here, they darted from place to place, their gestures were abrupt, but then they would hold a posture for a moment before letting it go, and it was only during those pauses that they had faces, in just the same way that they only had names in the intervals between therapies. That same airless feeling followed me outside, who knows why, but there was no relief for me in those streets. I still felt as though I had to pull heavy, lifeless air into my lungs in long ragged gulps, or I would strangle right there in front of everyone, in the so-called open air.

  I needed a name to investigate under, it was still too early to see Wilson, my apartment was no place to go at a time like this, so I stopped in at Lucky’s and ended up in a booth of reporters crammed in a corner. Dank clouds of smoke and cough syrup steam sat on us. I had a tasteless glass of flat beer and suddenly the conversation was rolling by way over my head, as if my plug had been pulled. The swig was painful, scraping my throat, and I realized I was getting another god damned cold. With a sigh I pulled myself back up to the surface in time to hear Dr. Panos Wilson say—

  “... not after what happened Tuesday.”

  Through his “cool sunglasses,” I could see Dr. Douglas Wilson’s eyes flick up from his glass.

  “Be careful with that. We don’t want too much ‘excitement’ around here.”

  “Why? What happened Tuesday?” I asked dully.

  “I think that would be an ‘exciting’ answer, Wilson.”

  “Really? You’re going to be like that?”

  Douglas Wilson was always like that: needlessly cagey. Like it wasn’t enough intrigue we were all in snap brim cigarette hats in a press bar talking about deep therapies.

  “A man died on the roof of one of the cones,” Dr. Kagami Wilson said. “He died of a heart attack while running from two Councillors.”

  “Look,” I told the table. “I’m about to make the rounds like I said. I just got handed the Hensig case. Again. I’ll come back and fill you in if you’ll set me up with a name now.”

  “Dr. Santanu Wilson,” she said.

  If I had been less murky from incipient fever I might not have registered the weird feeling that name stirred in me.

  “Do I know him?” I said aloud.

  ***

  Next stop was Wilson’s Pawn, which alternated two hours open then closed for three round the clock. The store was empty. The only lights were the dim bulbs inside the glass decay cases I mean display cases and the greenish glare of the desk lamp through the partition in back. I rang the bell and a voice called to me she’d be right there. A menacing, stuffy silence filled the shop; the atmosphere was a tight fit in there. Between the closeness, my sore throat, and all the glinting of glass panes, the store felt like a greenhouse where drug plants were grown.

  Dr. Maite Wilson was a small Mapuche woman with a flower in her green visor.

  “Hola Tommaso,” she said quietly, folding her arms on the counter and leaning on them.

  “Necesito un nombre de investigacion.”

  “Cuatro cien Americano.”

  I pulled out my therapy wheel and she stamped it. Then she click-clacked across the black marble floor and opened the counter flap for me. The operation investing me with the investigation name involved my tilting my head back into a brass mortar, a bit like getting a shampoo at the barber shop. A copper tube pissed baptismal water onto the center of my forehead while the naming machine, which also made espresso, told Dr. Wilson the name through a heavy bakelite drive-in-movie box speaker. Then she whispered it to me and raised her “cool sunglasses” to expose her staring blank eyes and wrote it in water on my forehead with a firm middle finger.

  Juan Ponce

  Juan Ponce

  Tu eres

  Juan Ponce

  Tu eres...

  ***

  I must have fallen asleep. I was sitting in the chair in Wilson’s Pawn, the lights were all off, the door to the street was open. I was alone. My watch told me about forty minutes had gone by. I got up, feeling like a man of lead, that heavy plumbrous Juan Ponce tu eres Juan Juan Ponce Ponce still weighing me down. I heard myself sigh and remarked on how unsurprised I was at being alone. Night had deepened outside, but that didn’t mean anybody was about to take off their “cool sunglasses.” The trams were crawling like slaves beneath the streets in a silent town where the phone never rings and you could see the bacteria swarm the streetlamps like mosquitos.

  The Night Coroner, Dr. Wilson, was so black her white habit seemed empty as she came toward me along the tunnel-like, unlit entryway to the Night Wing of the Hospital on Wilson Avenue.

  “Dr. Wilson? Meet Dr. Ponce,” I said.

  The air inside the Hospital had, in addition to the hospital smell of gauze and sanes, that clammy, used-up staleness that builds up in small closed rooms where people are sleeping. Floodlighting banished every shadow. I knew this woman, it occurred to me, from another story a lot like this one. Some other case. She was not a real “Night Coroner” but she was real; the same could be said of me, come to think of it.

  Hensig’s body was lying on the floor, still in his burial clothes. Cerements, was the word. The white cuffs protruding limply from the sleeves of his jacket were empty. A lifelike pair of wooden hands had been set, one atop the other, on the floor beside him.

  “What happened to his hands?” I asked.

  “Have a look at this,” she said, and knelt beside his head. Using the tip of her mechanical pencil, she separated the unbuttoned collar and exposed the throat. The bloodless seam of a postmortem incision extending from the base of the jaw down toward the chest sagged there, open like a misbuttoned shirt. She stood up again.

  “The larynx, as well as the hands, were illicitly removed before burial.”

  “Larynx and hands, huh? What about his eyes?” I asked. “They gone?”

  “That’s another curiosity,” she said. “They are reported incinerated...”

  She crossed to the enameled steel lectern in the corner and showed me the entry in a hundred pound red record book. I bent over the page and squinted at incinerated and the date, inked in columns with fountain pen. The ink, the hand, seemed to be the same for all the entries on both pages; I couldn’t tell if the fishiness of those words was just the shadow of suspicion she threw on them. Then I began to see something real.

  “The first i in incinerated,” I said.

  “You noticed it too!” she said.

  “All right, we both noticed, but it’s... it’s nothin
g, it’s not proof of anything.”

  I unrolled a cigarette, extracting from a brown vial two yellow capsules that I snapped and sprinkled over the yellow tobacco.

  “Let’s assume that this entry is forged. Why?” she asked, sitting in the windowseat with the floodlight flooding all around her.

  “Assuming all the parts were taken by the same party,” I said. “Eyes, voice, and hands of a hypnotist...”

  “How would they be used?”

  “You could study them to define physical attributes of an effective hypnotist,” I said. “—Unless you were looking to use them to re-establish influence over persons previously hypnotized by the guy...”

  Dr. Wilson’s hand flew to her mouth. The glare around her head made it difficult to read her face, but there was some consternation there.

  “You all right?” I asked.

  She nodded, lowered her hand.

  “Yes,” she said simply.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I was one of his patients,” she said.

  “So was I,” I told her. “That’s why you’re talking to me, instead of to someone important.”

  “Everyone’s important,” she said immediately.

  ***

  Being precise as clockwork in everything he did you would think Councillor Hensig would have driven a German car, but he didn’t; he pulled up every day at two minutes to two in a huge 1963 American accordioned by accidents in four different places, the metal battered into conical facets but the icy black paint scratched nowhere. At night it swam into view out of the incandescent black of a rainy street with a ragged gurgling hollow under its hoodslab, a car shaped like a hatchet blade. I remembered the car almost more vividly than I remembered its owner; he was just a movie character projected by the cones, an expressionistic embodiment of psychological order. A virtuoso of the clockwork trap, the special essence of logic which is to lock doors and cage us with bars of ideas words and air, cages of time and space. No joke, he did use an empty amulet painted to look like a watch with raised hands, two minutes to two, when he hypnotized me.

  “Relax... relax...”

  Back and forth he swung the amulet in an arc that managed to be perfectly regular and yet look asymmetrical.

  “You are getting sleepy. Your eyelids are growing heavy. Heavy as lead.”

  What do you mean growing I used to think. When aren’t they heavy as lead?

  He was going to rewrite me therapeutically, or so he thought. I was a plant working a story, posing as a patient to see if Hensig was as on the level as he appeared to be. Insofar as he explained himself at all, the Councillor claimed that his therapy had unearthed deeply-concealed psychological problems in his patients.

  “They were going to break, they were going to explode!” I remembered him shouting at us in the street when our incessant needling of him had finally gotten the better of his patience. “The earlier you set off someone in that condition, the less the harm! Why can’t you just wait?!”

  Not all that convincing though, at least with no word at all coming out of those secret hospitals without names, each one sealed beneath a hermetic glass cone, where his patients ended up. Their lights, their windows, their silhouettes were all anyone could see through that thick glass, at once transparent and somehow murky too, like a sunny, foggy day.

  I had had a chip on my shoulder—it was still there—and so I volunteered to undergo a bogus treatment. We didn’t try to bamboozle Hensig with an elaborate cover story; instead, I went in as myself, with only a vague complaint about not being able to maintain relationships. This was true, although the details of the story were false. Most importantly, I had been “armored” by a pair of other hypnotists against any exposure or deep manipulation by Councillor Hensig.

  Up spiral ramps feeling worse in the unbreathable gloom, everyone lost in their own thoughts as usual. Now at last it was time to visit the Night Recorder, who waved me up from his window on the seventh floor when I pressed his buzzer. In near total darkness I climbed the concrete flights, groping my way by gripping a handrail that seemed to be dripping motor oil. The building was completely quiet, and I wondered if the Night Recorder were the only person in it besides myself. And why, in that case, did he have to have an office up seven fucking unlit flights of stairs.

  The Night Recorder was waiting for me in the silvery gush of light from his office doorway, all the way at the far end of the passage.

  “Dr. Santanu Wilson? Meet Dr. Ponce.”

  He was a tall, long-wristed man, white shirt, black vest hanging open, tie loose. He mopped his face, slick with sweat his lean throat gleamed like a knife.

  “I was told to expect you,” he said, turning from me stiffly. He walked stooped, like an older man. His desk and filing cabinets were so brightly lit I couldn’t tell if they were made of wood, metal or the gold of El Dorado.

  “I can’t show Hensig’s file to you, legally,” he said. “But I can answer questions as long as they don’t require me to break any confidentiality regulations.”

  “Some of it I remember,” I said. “Hensig was his real name, right? Originally from Germany?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And he spent some time in mental institution?”

  “Right again,” Dr. Wilson nodded. He picked up the file and glanced through it, shifting pages. The cigarette glued to his lower lip dribbled ashes onto the forms as he spoke. “The SA called him up but he was excluded on psychiatric grounds as too nuts for the Nazis, fancy that.”

  “Studied medicine in England, right?”

  “Only for a few months,” Dr. Wilson said. “His degree he got in Canada. To-ron-to.”

  “How much of his medical record can I see?”

  “All you want,” he said, and tossed down a curly bundle of pages. He went over to the window and leaned out again, as he had been when I first saw him.

  “Never any air around here,” he said. Iranian accent. Armenian, maybe.

  I sat down to read. Dr. Wilson offered me a drink. I shook my head. On the job. It was hard to keep from nodding. Can’t anybody buy a fan? I thought testily.

  In time I located some of Hensig’s own writing, a letter of resignation from a psychiatric research hospital somewhere in Ottawa.

  The story is solidly behind us now, firmly detected by the shoulderblades and the base of the spine like a wall you without relenting push away, but then we are all familiar with the story by now aren’t we doctors?

  What once was a small town perched on a conical hill has become a forest of glass cones to the horizon in all directions extending, ablaze with blue moonlight and multiplying the flashes beneath the frequent thunderstorms and, doctors, as you can see, these thunderstorms are frequent and violent—you can plainly see the gashes the lightning leaves behind, those splintered cones of glass there, their steel beams like the broken twigs of a birds’ nest, would you agree, you doctors of ornithology? The inexorable unification of psychology and geometry is there pursued; a non-Euclidean geometric proof, you doctors of psychology, and you, doctors of geometry, both can understand.

  He’d already moved here when he wrote that. Hensig wasn’t the prescient he liked to believe he was.

  “It says here he owned his apartment. Has that been reassigned yet?”

  After a long time fumbling among his folders, Dr. Wilson pulled one out and studied the sheaf of papers inside. He studied it for a while.

  Come on, I thought. The man was motionless. Even his eyes were fixed. I thought even the smoke rising from his cigarette had stopped moving. I’m having enough trouble keeping myself going, and now you start, I thought. He seemed to sense my impulse to snap him out of it with a rap on the skull and spoke up in time.

  “There’s an extension through the end of this year.”

  I jumped on that.

  “Is it family?”r />
  He shook his head.

  “Lodgings Authorization Bureau.”

  ***

  Even though he died two years and two months ago, Hensig’s apartment had still not been released by the Lodgings Authorization Bureau and his landlord had to keep it as is until he received word from them. Dr. Rodel Wilson, the landlord, was a hairless Filipino man with ashen skin, just under middle height and thickly muscled in his paper-thin linen suit.

  “Go on. Have a look,” he said, opening the door to 2C.

  The apartment was a shambles.

  “Whoever did it knew when,” he said. “Believe me, there is always someone watching this building. Always. But two days ago, my sister called me. I had to go at once you understand. But I called my friend to come. He kept an eye on things while I was away. So I got to my sister’s. She’d never called me. I tried to call my friend. No answer. I came back here. And what do I find? This! My friend? His car was stolen. Almost in front of him. The moment he came out to drive over here.”

  I looked around with a shiver of distaste. This was where he’d brought me. From the front doorway to the apartment I could see the corner by the window where I once sat, undergoing his hypnosis.

  “Do you have any idea what was taken, Dr. Wilson?”

  He shook his head, then I thought I saw his eyes shrewdly narrowing through his “cool sunglasses.”

  “No, I have no way of knowing that. But one thing I think is that they, whoever, went through the whole apartment and moved every single thing. They took down the paintings. The mirrors, everything came off the walls.”

  With alarm I felt that shiver of distaste growing into a fierce repugnance. It was as if the apartment were pressing me back out through the door with magnetic waves. So I swallowed painfully and drove myself clear across the apartment, stepping violently over the displaced furniture, my feet kicking up a smell that clawed at my memory, almost stopping me. Cats, although he’d not had any, and stale cigarette smoke. I opened a window and thrust my head out for a moment into the inert air outside.