THE MADNESS OF DR. CALIGARI

by Dennis Weiler

  Hans Gruber is among them. He wears the gaslight about him like a cloak, but I am unnoticed. The town hall is shuttered, the square deserted save for shadows and blowing trash.

  The day’s paper. My father’s name appears below the headline, some words just legible for the gleam of gas-lamps on the snow. ORPHANAGE-SCHOOL CONSPIRACY. EVIDENCE OF LIFE INSURANCE FRAUD. A LIST OF THOSE IMPLICATED.

  Father’s voice. I hear him calling to me from across the square, find him lying in the muck behind a fruit-seller’s cart, his forehead gashed open.

  “Those men,” he says. Dazed. Concussed. “The priest’s boys.”

  I help him up. He mutters to himself as we stumble home.

  “The same as before,” he says. “His hands on me. That spoon which took my eye. Those things they called me. Nothing changes in this world, but somehow, I am changed. This time—”

  SEVENTEEN

  The shadows are different, deeper for the moon which fills the parlor. Herr Ostermann’s house. His wife Anna is beside me, tea and saucer cupped in her trembling hands. The sun is down, the lamps unlit. We do not speak or stir.

  Ostermann is on the stair. He storms into the room and halts halfway across the rug. He stands awkwardly, fidgeting with his hat. He stinks of sweat and hair-grease and will not meet my eye.

  Anna speaks. “The trial. It is done?”

  Ostermann nods. “Guilty.”

  “And the sentence?”

  “Three years.”

  He collapses on the settee. He hooks his thumbs in his watch-chain, curses under his breath. A train’s whistle sounds, shattering the twilight.

  “Tell us,” Anna says.

  “Anna…”

  “He deserves to know what happened.”

  Ostermann looks down at the rug.

  “Your father is a brave man,” he tells me. “Always you must remember that. Today he showed more courage than any man I have known. He faced his accusers. He testified on his behalf. But the judge was a fiend. He is Steinfeld’s man—you may depend on it—and so too the witnesses they called. Such lies they told! Leibenhauer. That crooked priest. What a nightmare we inhabit to have such men among us.”

  Anna says: “But your witness, the insurance clerk—”

  Ostermann shakes his head. “Dead.”

  “Dead!”

  “Suicide, they say. It happened last night. The devils!”

  “Friedrich,” she says, gently.

  He closes his eyes. “They have seen to everything.”

  Again the whistle howls down the line. The windows hum, the engine drawing near.

  EIGHTEEN

  The trains are at the station. August, and the young men form columns in the square. They are dressed in gray with rifles at their shoulders, flowers bound in wreaths about their necks and the town’s women surrounding to see them off.

  Gruber is a sergeant now. He barks an order and the men fix bayonets, present their guns to the officers as they ride past, resplendent in boots and cuirasses. Von Steinfeld leads the procession, his saber bared and upraised so the sunlight pours from it. Doctor Leibenhauer rides behind. His spectacles gleam, reflective, cutting circles where his eyes should be.

  Von Steinfeld calls the officers to a halt. A figure in black appears among the women. Father Johannes. He steps from the crowd and the men incline their heads to hear his prayers for victory. The horses stamp, whinny. The prayer is done. Von Steinfeld nods to Gruber, who shouts the men into motion while the women, watching, weep for pride or fear.

  The horses first and the young men follow, marching as though asleep with the flowers raining down before them and their mothers screaming Fatherland. The men do not break step. Their faces betray nothing as they are led to the trains and the war and all to be buried in their sacks while their fathers count the profits.

  Your father is a brave man. Always you must remember that.

  I sprint back to the square, up the steps of the town hall. Father Johannes appears in the doorway, but I am taller than him now. I cast him down, leap over him as he falls.

  Upstairs. I follow the winding flight to the clock-tower and draw the bolt to seal myself inside. The fire-bell hangs over me, suspended in its swinging frame. Through the clock I watch the troop trains loading, hear the ocean in the crowd’s roar.

  I jump for the bell-pull. Catch hold of the rope and drag it down. The bell sounds. I rise as the counterweight drops, hurtling upward, then falling with the pull as the bell strikes again, deafening, and there are voices at the locked door now, fists beating against it.

  The bell sounds again and again. Blood trickles from my ears and still the soldiers file into the waiting cars like horses to the slaughter and I lose my grip upon the rope. The first of the trains moves forward, gathering speed, soundless on its rails of grease while the whole of this darkening day crashes down with me, and all is silence, sleep.

  NINETEEN

  “Fourteen years. You say he slept throughout that time? Until his father adopted him—and his condition improved? How remarkable. His father must have been an ingenious man. Yes, quite ingenious, though I see he has since died in prison. A shame. No doubt it was the shock of it all which caused the patient’s relapse. I trust you have recovered fully, Father? Good, good. Of course it’s all very sad, but you were right to entrust him to my care. You may know I possess some expertise in the area of hypnosis, which is known to produce miracles in cases such as this. After all, isn’t obedience the innermost wish of all men? To serve a master? To be of use? You really mustn’t worry, Father. He will soon be well. I shall find for him a purpose.”

  I

  Diaz had the guy’s story. He always knew the details of whoever’s place they were clearing out. How, Carpentier couldn’t figure. It wasn’t as if Google turned up any information about the people who’d lost their houses (he’d checked). They were part of the ongoing collapse of the housing bubble, the calamity that had pulled the larger economy into a pit that appeared to have no bottom. Most of them had walked away from the lives their over-mortgaged houses represented, taking only what could be carried in overnight bags and suitcases, abandoning the furniture, the appliances, the electronics whose costs crowded the credit cards they had defaulted on. They were a type, but somehow, Diaz was aware of their individual histories. For a time, Carpentier had assumed Ocampo gave Diaz the information, but the boss claimed not to know anything about the former owners of the houses whose contents they removed. The creditors had a guy who called Ocampo, gave him the address, told him where the find the key to the front door, and that was all. Nor did the payment for the completed job come with bonus facts about the men and women whose sofas and refrigerators Ocampo, Diaz, and Carpentier had spent hours relocating. Eventually, Carpentier asked Diaz point-blank where he’d heard these stories he told. Diaz shrugged, looked away, and said, “You know, around,” and refused to be drawn any further on the subject. Annoyed, Carpentier decided that what his coworker was telling them was most likely his own invention, fiction.

  Except there were enough instances where Diaz’s narratives coincided with the contents of the houses with such quirky accuracy that it seemed he had to be in possession of some secret source of information. The third place Carpenter had worked with him, a pale green McMansion in Huguenot whose strip of overgrown lawn was the same size as the front walk, Diaz had predicted they would be done with quickly. “Couple put all their money in the house,” he said. “Although there’s supposed to be a nice TV in the living room and some top flight Scotch in the liquor cabinet.” Which there was—as there was a top flight gas grill on a house in Cold Spring’s back deck, and a framed display of vintage baseball cards hung in the study of a place in Rhinebeck. There was never a question of Diaz taking any of the things he described, which, in the case of smaller items like the gold-inlaid music box or the trio of Seiko watches, he could have. Y
es, Ocampo had a strict no-stealing policy; even the liquor they found, he did not want them drinking. But he had only ever asked them if their pockets were empty, and that, months ago, when Diaz was new and Carpentier was newer. At this point, it would have been easy enough to remove one or two little things without raising Ocampo’s suspicion. But no: all of it, every last bit of property in the houses, they packed or wrapped, loaded onto the truck, and delivered to one of several warehouses down in Westchester.

  After he had been working for Ocampo for a couple of months, Carpentier felt sufficiently comfortable to tack on a last-minute addition to their house-clearing routine. Once the truck was full, the rear door lowered and locked, Carpentier returned to the now-empty house. He told Diaz and Ocampo that he was making sure they hadn’t forgotten anything, which Ocampo at first believed, crediting Carpentier as a conscientious worker, then grew suspicious of, demanding to know if Carpentier had hidden something, a small valuable he was running back to reclaim. Carpentier wasn’t, and turned out his pockets as proof of his honesty. Diaz spoke up on his behalf, told the boss to be calm, the guy was being responsible, Ocampo should be grateful. When the two of them were on their own—walking out to their cars, say—Carpentier expected Diaz to ask what he was up to with his final inspections. He did not.

  In fact, Carpentier told him one night, when they stopped at a sports bar near their office in downtown Poughkeepsie prior to heading to their respective homes. He had been debating the matter with himself for several days. Following their toast to another day cleaning up other folks’ messes, Carpentier drained half his Heineken and, as the alcohol splashed around his stomach, started to speak. “You, uh, you know how I go through the houses before we leave?”

  “Yeah,” Diaz said.

  “First—you know I’m not stealing anything, right? Hiding stuff and taking it when no one’s around?”

  “I know it.”

  “What it is, is there’s this feeling I get.”

  “You get a feeling.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What kind of feeling?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to figure out how to say. Like, nothing.”

  “You don’t feel anything?”

  “No,” Carpentier said, “I feel nothing. It’s like… Okay: if we were in a really old place, somewhere people had been living for, you know, generations, it would have a certain kind of…energy. Like all the stuff that happened there, all the history, had left an impression. Or, as if the house was a battery, and it had built up a charge that could be measured, like… like with a voltmeter. That’s what I am, the voltmeter. These places we’re emptying, though, most of them are too new for any of that kind of stuff—for a charge to have built up. You’d think that would be that. Like you said, there wouldn’t be anything to feel. Except there is. There’s this space… not inside the house, but this other space, that’s waiting for what whoever was living there was supposed to give it. I noticed it a while ago, on the first couple of jobs we did. I wanted to, I don’t know, check it out, so that’s what I’ve been doing.” Carpentier was suddenly aware that he had been talking for a long time. He looked down, embarrassment coloring his face.

  “Man,” Diaz said with a grin, “that is some fucked-up shit. Crazy.” He drank from his beer, shook his head. “You psychic or something?”

  “Nah,” Carpentier said. “I don’t know. I mean, I’ve always been aware there was something going on in houses I was in, but I didn’t think anything of it. This is the first time I’ve picked up on this particular feeling.”

  “Well, that’s a relief,” Diaz said, “‘cause I got shit I do not want you finding out about.”

  The joke served its purpose, defusing the awkwardness that had gathered around Carpentier’s confession. Diaz moved the conversation onto the subject of the latest Prince CD, which Carpentier hadn’t heard and Diaz said was some of the singer’s best work, ever. “I’ll burn you a copy,” he said, a gesture Carpentier said wasn’t necessary but Diaz insisted was no trouble. “You got to be educated, young man,” he said, which Carpentier found funny, because Diaz and he were the same age.

  Afterward, once Carpentier was in his room at the boarding house in Hyde Park, he thought that what he’d said to Diaz, the way he’d tried to explain what he experienced in those emptied houses, hadn’t been right at all. He hadn’t told Diaz how fragile the houses seemed, how flimsy, as if they were stage sets, painted plywood and lighting effects, the theater on the other side of their false walls. And in the seats, watching his progress through the houses… what? What audience regarded his performance? He didn’t know.

  II

  A couple of weeks later, the day’s assignment took them north to Wiltwyck, to an address on Montague Street that Carpentier thought looked like a witch’s house. Orange with brown trim, it was tall, narrow, the peaked roof overhanging the second storey in a way that made the residence appear to be wearing a giant pointed hat. The place was sided with rows of wooden shingles whose lower ends were curved, which gave the impression it was covered in scales. Its paint was faded, chipped in spots. Situated at the top of a short rise, the house stood at one end of a block whose other dwellings were larger, multi-family structures on whose front steps men of various ages sat alone and in pairs, the hands of more than one clutching bottles wrapped in brown paper bags. To reach the front door, you had to climb six marble stairs set in the ground, then another half dozen wooden steps. It wasn’t the worst situation they’d encountered, not by a long shot, but the stairs were the type of extra complication that would grow noticeable as the job progressed. Ocampo parked the truck so the rear door was at the foot of the stairs.

  “So,” Carpentier said to Diaz as they pulled their work gloves on, hauled blankets out of the back of the truck, “what’re we gonna find in here?”

  “Seems this guy,” Diaz said, “was a movie freak. Collected all kinds of shit: posters, props, some costumes.”

  “Huh,” Ocampo said.

  “All right,” Carpentier said.

  There was more of the movie-related stuff than Carpentier expected. There was more of everything than he expected. Unlike the places they usually cleared, which hadn’t been inhabited long enough to fill with many possessions, this house held the detritus of decades. On the first floor, every available foot of wall space was lined with bookcases, their shelves stacked two and in some cases three volumes deep. The kitchen table, a desk in the back room, card tables scattered throughout the rooms held stacks of paper, most of them covered in single-spaced typeprint, with a few photocopies of black and white pictures that hadn’t been that clear to begin with. A stale odor of must lay heavy on the air. In the kitchen, beside a toaster oven whose glass door was opaque with baked-on grime, a flat wicker basket held layers of envelopes on whose fronts were printed URGENT and FINAL TERMINATION NOTICE in large red letters. “What do you think happened?” Carpentier asked.

  Ocampo shrugged. “Not my problem.”

  “Home equity loan on an overvalued property,” Diaz said. “Has to be.”

  “Man, you should be in real estate,” Ocampo said.

  Diaz smiled. “Who says I’m not?”

  Ocampo snorted.

  The second floor was considerably tidier. A pair of conjoined offices held display cases in which an assortment of small items was arranged on red velvet. A pair of round, tortoiseshell glasses, the right lens cracked, the legs askew, sat next to a nickel-plated revolver, beside which was a faded cream fedora with a blue band. There were no cards next to any of what Carpentier assumed were film props to identify them. Unsurprisingly, Diaz recognized a few. Leaning over a case, he said, “Those are Clark Kent’s glasses from Superman II. The scene where he gets his ass handed to him in the diner. The gun was held by Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon. The hat…that’s Peter Ustinov’s hat, isn’t it?”

  “If you say so,” Carpentier said.r />
  “What was the movie? We’re No Angels? The one with the snake, Adolph? That gets the halo, too, at the end?”

  “No idea,” Carpentier said.

  “Don’t you watch any movies?” Diaz said.

  “Sure,” Carpentier said. “I watch movies.”

  “Whatever’s on HBO, right?”

  “Nah, I can’t afford that shit. Network.”

  “Damn.”

  Despite his coworker’s attempt at making him feel ignorant, Carpentier knew the titles on most of the posters framed on the walls. The Man in the Iron Mask. Citizen Kane. On the Waterfront. Kramer vs. Kramer. Those hung in what must have been the bedroom were in foreign languages, German and what he was pretty sure was Japanese, but he recognized the word Nosferatu under a line drawing of a bald, white-skinned man with pointed ears and a vampire’s fangs. “Hey,” he said, “I know this one. It’s about a vampire.”

  “Good for you,” Ocampo said from where he was measuring the bed.

  “Where’s Diaz?”

  “I sent him to check the attic.”

  The stairs to the attic were behind a door in the room next to the bedroom, what might have been a spare bedroom but was now filled with long clothes racks, each dangling clear plastic garment bags in which were zippered suits and dresses new and old, uniforms of armies real and imaginary. A samurai sword and a saber were mounted one under the other on the rear wall. No doubt Diaz could sift through the costumes here and name the actor who wore it, the movie they wore it in, and what they had for breakfast the last time they had it on. He crossed to the stairs.

  Unfinished and unfurnished, the attic was an open space dominated by the thick brick chimney rising through its floor up out its ceiling. In front of the chimney, lying on a pair of sawhorses, was what Carpentier took for a coffin: a rectangular box, lidless, behind which Diaz stood with his arms crossed, shaking his head slowly from side to side. “I did not believe it,” he said as Carpentier walked toward him. “I knew it was supposed to be here—the information was good—but it seemed so… obvious, you know? Like here, in this place, is where you’re gonna find this. Of course you are, right? When we didn’t see it on the first floor, or the second, I thought, I knew it. Then I climb those stairs, and…” He nodded at the crate. Carpentier was shocked to see the man’s eyes bright with tears.