The Asylum of Dr. Caligari

by James Morrow

  “Contre nous de la tyrannie, l’étendard sanglant est levé!”

  “Our employer has come far,” I mused. “He got his start as a provincial mountebank, and today he commands a global war machine.”

  “After opening the cabinet, Caligari would awaken me and announce that the somnambulist was about to perform three amazing feats—swallowing a sword, eating a torch, and catching a bullet in his teeth. ‘You can do this,’ the hypnotist always told the sleepwalker. ‘The spirits will protect you.’ The feats were theatrical illusions, of course. But the fact that I would engage in these potentially suicidal acts proved I had no will of my own.”

  “Aux armes, citoyens! Formez vos bataillons! Marchons, marchons!”

  “The climax of the show had me telling the fortune of anyone in the audience brave enough to ask,” said Conrad. “I became skilled at offering the sort of cryptic prediction onto which a customer could project some deep personal meaning.”

  “Perhaps you would care to tell my fortune?” I said.

  “I would prefer to tell Caligari’s. ‘Listen, Signore, I have gazed into the future, and I have seen that henceforth you will bring only ugliness into the world, and so you must take up your Glisenti pistol and do the aesthetically necessary thing.’”

  The big parade continued throughout the day and well past sunset, Caligari employing the gas-lamps on the gallery walls to illuminate his painting, or so Conrad and I inferred from the staccato glow pulsing through the skylight. About once every two hours a troop train would steam into the station and disgorge a column of soldiers. The magician remained on his hill, brandishing his cane and clanging his bell as the recruits marched by. Shortly before I retired for the evening, the flower of English manhood was made to experience Ecstatic Wisdom, hundreds of bemused Tommies walking open-eyed into the museum and returning ready to die for any flag the Devil cared to wave.

  So rattled was I by the ghastly pageant that I canceled my Wednesday class and let it be known throughout the asylum that I’d contracted a respiratory infection. I spent the next two days hiding out in my apartments and experimenting with the Wessels-Wyndham theory of nonpictorial art. My first four efforts failed miserably, but the fifth—a torrid excrescence of red on a field of black—satisfied me, and so I gave it a name, Fearful Symmetry, with a nod to William Blake’s brightly burning tiger. I left it on the easel and stored its wretched predecessors in my bedroom closet.

  On Friday I returned to the classroom and pursued my therapeutic obligations as best I could, but my mind was fixed on Caligari’s marching somnambulists, to say nothing of that morning’s New York Herald headlines: Germany Violates Belgian Neutrality followed by British Expeditionary Force Headed for the Ardennes. I began by setting out the pan of baked sculptures—Mittendorff had done exactly as I’d asked—and supplying the students with jars of tempera paint. For the next three hours, the room hummed with the sort of enchanted energy generated by creative people working happily in tandem.

  Herr Mittendorff arrived punctually at noon. Without a whiff of condescension he expressed a giddy admiration for Ludwig’s golden songbird, Gaston’s silver-striped chess piece, Pietro’s polka-dotted parasite, and Ilona’s jet-black ancestor. After the orderly had conducted his charges out of the room, Ilona rushed toward me, her lips arranged in a sensual pout.

  “Young Francis, how wonderful that you have recovered from your illness, but I fear you are not yet incockulated.”

  “Inoculated.”

  “And that is why I told Nurse Roussel you will escort me to lunch again today. This plan raised both her eyebrows.”

  “As a matter of fact, it raises both my eyebrows, too. There are ethical considerations here.”

  “I agree. It is ethically imperative for a mental patient to cure her therapist’s Kriegslust.”

  “Also pragmatic considerations, by which I mean—”

  “Yesterday I stole a box of prophylactics from the infirmary,” she said, gesturing toward her madras bag.

  So we descended to my apartments, entered the bedroom, and, despite the impropriety of it all, set about boosting my immunity. We entwined and talked with equal intensity. Ilona announced that she’d decided to reveal why she hated her father. I informed her I had momentous news concerning Herr Direktor’s magnum opus.

  “What news?”

  Extending my frame fully along the luxurious goose-down mattress, I told her all about Tuesday’s sobering events—the tramping soldiers, the troop trains, the transformation of tender young men into sleepwalking warriors.

  “I heard the tramping, too, but I thought it was rats in the walls,” said Ilona.

  “I would guess that every German and Austrian field marshal knows about Caligari’s war machine, and every Entente general as well, for what sane commander would deny himself the ultimate aesthetic weapon?”

  “Young Francis, this wicked picture must be destroyed.”

  “I don’t disagree.”

  “You ‘don’t disagree’? Can’t you be less torpid?”

  “Tepid?”

  “No, torpid.”

  I contemplated her intricate face, its sculpted beauty defying the shadows wrought by the bed canopy. “Have patience with me, Ilona,” I said at last. “I’m out of my depth here. Politics confounds me. Caligari says the war will be transcendently meaningless, and I don’t know whether he’s being canny or facetious or both.”

  “From what I have read in the Berliner Morgenpost, ‘transcendently meaningless’ sounds exactly right,” she said with a brittle laugh. “We must devise a plan of attack.”

  “Assuming an attack is a good idea . . .”

  “Of course it’s a good idea. How much more transcendent meaninglessness can the world endure?”

  “Getting at the thing would be virtually impossible,” I said. “The parade occurs around the clock, and Caligari has posted a guard outside the gallery.”

  “Perhaps Herr Direktor, like Herr Jehovah, will rest on the Sabbath?”

  “Perhaps.”

  We abandoned the bed and wandered into the sitting room, where we harvested wine and cheese from the icebox, then settled onto the divan. Still resting on the easel, my recent oil painting glowed in the silken afternoon light streaming through the casement.

  “I see you’ve begun working with our theory,” said Ilona evenly.

  “I’m reasonably happy with it.”

  “Our theory, or your painting?”

  “Both. I call it Fearful Symmetry.”

  “Is it finished?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “This is not quite what I had in mind, young Francis, but you are stumbling in the right direction. I like the title. It invites the spectator to engage with the painting’s Existenz by way of the tiger’s Nichtexistenz.”

  I took a long swallow of Riesling. “Ilona, this is perhaps a crude and tasteless question—”

  “I understand.”

  “You do?”

  “The doctors around here are always asking me crude and tasteless questions. Why should my art therapist be any different?”

  “Did Herr Slevoght become your lover, too?”

  “No.”

  “I’m relieved.”

  “He likes only men.”

  “I see.”

  “Evidently he and Conrad were the best of friends, but that isn’t why Caligari sent Herr Slevoght away. Dr. Verguin told me it was about philotopical differences.”

  “Philosophical.”

  “I suppose I loved Herr Slevoght, though not in the way I love you, and not in the way I hated my father.”

  She took a languorous sip of wine, then rose from the divan and opened the icebox.

  “My little brother Dieter and I came of age in a ramshackle chalet outside of Holstenwall,” she continued, removing a cluster of grapes. “Father was a genius, a brilliant mathematician, but he was also a fool. He could have taken a university appointment—Georg Cantor desperately wanted him at Halle—but inst
ead Johann Wessels spent his days sitting by the hearth, thinking about infinities, and in time I came to detest him.”

  “You mean infinity.”

  “No, infinities. There are many, as Cantor discovered. An infinite number. Mother gave piano lessons and took in laundry. Otherwise we would have starved. I have come to hate the idea of infinity almost as much as I hate my father.

  “Infinity is a peculiar choice of enemy.”

  “But one befitting a lunatic, ja?” Ilona detached a grape from the network of stems. “Eventually Dieter ran away to Australia. Mother died of consumption. I survived two disastrous marriages and a third that would have failed if the bastard hadn’t accidentally drowned. At least I inherited his bank account.” She swallowed the grape. “As for Father—let’s just say he never lost track of his service revolver.” She approached the easel and pointed to the center of Fearful Symmetry. “Young Francis, you must place a dot of cobalt blue here. That is what your painting wants.”

  The following day, the Hebrew Sabbath, I ascended to the clock tower and once again observed the depressing spectacle of governments priming schoolboys for slaughter. By now the gray-suited troops of Czar Nicholas II had joined the mobilization, absorbing the painting prior to their deployment on whatever Eastern Front was destined to open between the Gulf of Riga and the Black Sea.

  Then came the Christian Sabbath, and no mass mesmerizations occurred, just as Ilona had predicted, the generals and heads of state having evidently agreed to countenance the Savior over Soldatentum on the holiest day of the week. Ilona, I decided, was right: an attack was needed—and the dragonslayer, I resolved, must be myself.

  I left the clock tower, the bell tolling behind me, twelve deafening peals, and hurried to my classroom. The bottom shelf of the supply cabinet held canisters of turpentine for cleaning oil paint from brushes, palettes, and fingers. I removed a one-gallon container and unscrewed the cap. An unmistakable fragrance razored forth, befouling the air.

  As I resealed the canister and slipped it into my rucksack, I wondered whether saturating the painting with turpentine would really disable it. Could it be that, against those alchemical pigments, an ordinary solvent would prove useless? Might I need to immolate the monster? I rifled through the cabinet in search of matchsticks (essential for lighting the annealing torch employed in repoussé metalwork), eventually finding a box labeled Streichhölzer: Hergestellt in Dresden.

  Once back in my apartments, I drank two glasses of wine. Seeking to further distract myself, I alternately read Victor Hugo’s The Man Who Laughs—my study came with an English translation—and worked on my nonpictorial painting. Ilona was right about the dot of cobalt.

  Night came to Weizenstaat. With the stealth of a Schwarzwald wolf I slunk down the passageway to the gallery, the turpentine canister riding in my rucksack. The door was locked but unguarded. I opened it with Slevoght’s stolen key. Silently waiting to ensnare Monday’s battalions, the painting still hung on the west wall, its crimson curtain illuminated by the moonbeams glancing through the skylight.

  While patronizing the museum, some soldier or other had knocked over a sculpture by Ludwig resembling a stupendous saguaro cactus. I set the piece upright, then secured the turpentine in the crook between the two largest arms. I removed the lid. Again the scent rushed out, abrading my sinuses.

  Leaving the turpentine in place, I crossed the gallery, took a deep breath, and grasped the curtain with both hands. Like a matador flourishing his cape, I swirled the velvet in an extravagant arc, then let it fall. I averted my eyes. The singing began immediately.

  “Solang ein Tropfen Blut noch glüht, noch eine Faust den Degen zieht . . .”

  Fixing my gaze on the floor, I returned to the cactus sculpture and retrieved my weapon.

  “Und noch ein Arm die Büchse spannt . . .”

  I charged the malign painting, waving the open canister back and forth like a deranged gardener wielding a watering can. Stinking streams of turpentine flew toward Ecstatic Wisdom, but instead of splashing against the canvas they halted in midair, a full yard shy of the stretcher frame.

  “Betritt kein Feind hier deinen Strand!”

  Against all logic, the suspended turpentine coalesced into a translucent sheet as large as a bedspread, even as the matchbox flew out of my pocket and hovered before me like the dagger in Macbeth. A single stick emerged from the compartment, then ignited itself. I dropped the empty canister. The matchbox fell to the floor.

  Gliding purposefully, the lit match pricked the floating cataract, whereupon the turpentine burst into flames. As the fiery liquid veil flew toward me, it let out an unearthly shriek. Black acrid smoke filled the room. Coughing, I spun on my heel and sprinted away. The burning veil pursued me around the gallery like a pyromaniacal banshee.

  “Allons enfants de la Patrie, le jour de gloire est arrivé!”

  Whatever mystic principles drove the red demon, it was not exempt from the laws of physics. Before it could murder me, the veil ran short of fuel. The flames expired, leaving me shaken and nauseated, but alive.

  “Contre nous de la tyrannie, l’étendard sanglant est levé!”

  As if hoping to rattle me with a final demonstration of its powers, the painting now caused the fallen curtain to rise and drape itself over the stretcher frame. I retrieved both canister and matchbox, then stumbled out of the gallery, a thumping in my chest, an embarrassment in my trousers, a knot of despair in my stomach.

  From now until the armistice—though God alone knew when that would occur—Ecstatic Wisdom would rule the Western Front, the Eastern Front, and whatever additional murderous circuses the generals cared to convene. A half-dozen governments, and perhaps many more, would fill the sorcerer’s coffers with gold and his soul with unholy satisfactions. Perhaps later in the century some other magician would devise a better-oiled and more efficient war machine, but for the time being Alessandro Caligari had the field to himself.

  For Monday’s lesson I removed the reproduction of The Scream from the wall of my study and bore it to my classroom. I set the painting on the chalkboard and, after equipping the pupils with hand mirrors, instructed them to copy it using colored pencils. But this was not a simple exercise in mimicry, for I required everyone to replace the shrieking figure on the bridge with a self-portrait.

  “By representing yourself as the personification of despair,” I said in a steady, confident voice (for I now regarded myself as a genuine art therapist), “you will be taking a courageous step toward rehabilitation.”

  At the end of the class, Gaston, Ludwig, and Pietro approached me and reported that, thanks to Munch’s encounter with the abyss, they could imagine their misery one day progressing to mere unhappiness. But Ilona had resisted the assignment. Instead of superimposing her own features on the screamer’s face, she had copied Munch’s vision line for line.

  “A Spider Queen is forbidden to portray herself in any medium,” she explained after the others had left.

  “My dear Fräulein Wessels, you aren’t really—”

  “What would you know of ‘really,’ young Francis? I’ve seen more ‘really’ in my life than women twice my age. If I want to stay away from ‘really’ until my money runs out and I have to leave here, then that is what I shall do.”

  Not until we’d secluded ourselves in the privacy of my apartments, contemplating the paintings I’d made prior to Fearful Symmetry (and analyzing their failure to actualize Existenz), did I tell Ilona about Sunday’s fiery disaster.

  “I should have been there to protect you,” she said.

  “I’m glad you weren’t. You might have been badly burned.”

  “So what happens next, my darling?”

  “Nothing happens next.”

  “You’re giving up after just one attack?”

  “It was one attack too many.” Eager to change the subject, I showed Ilona the most recent New York Herald to reach my door. French Armies Sweep toward Alsace-Lorraine, ran the headline. General Joff
re Seeks to Reclaim Region from German Empire. “Tomorrow morning we’ll read of the first engagement, and then another will follow, and another, and another.”

  My prediction proved woefully correct. Western Europe had begun to bleed. For the remainder of the month my life became a pandemonic carnival of teaching art lessons to mental patients (my assignments were uninspired but the students seemed to find them therapeutic), escorting Ilona to lunch by way of my apartments (thereby further scandalizing Nurse Roussel), and reading about the great Continental hemorrhage. First came a horrendous fight for Alsace, then equally gruesome struggles for Lorraine, the Ardennes, Charleroi, Mons, Le Cateau, and Guise, a conglomeration of engagements that the journalists termed the Battle of the Frontiers. Belgian casualties: 4,500. British: 29,597. German: 305,594. French: 329,000. In consequence of miscalculations by the French field marshal, Joseph Joffre, the Kaiser’s troops were now overrunning much of Flanders, Artois, and Champagne. Owing to blunders by the German field marshal, Helmuth von Moltke, General Joffre had succeeded in transferring a large force to the west to secure the defense of Paris. Although neither side had won the Battle of the Frontiers, neither side had lost it either, except for those thousands of young men who’d been folded into the campaign’s alleged necessities and inexorable arithmetic.

  On the day after General Joffre achieved at Guise his late August victoire sans lendemain, his hollow triumph, Conrad appeared at my door and announced that Caligari wanted to see me at four o’clock that afternoon. With a heavy heart I told Conrad about my calamitous attempt to destroy Ecstatic Wisdom.

  “I admire your bravery,” he said.

  “I don’t. It nearly got me killed. What’s the agenda for my meeting with Herr Direktor?”

  “He didn’t say, but I suspect it concerns your turpentine attack.”

  “God help me.”

  With surpassing trepidation I made my way to the fourth floor, convinced that Caligari had learned of my foray and intended to exact punishment. But as it happened, he wished to address a far more congenial matter.