The Asylum of Dr. Caligari

by James Morrow

  Major Mueller put the Landschiff in gear. The treads began their screeching revolutions, and the vehicle moved grindingly forward. Ilona helped me shoulder the heavy cylinder, then lit the igniter wick with a wooden match from the carpetbag.

  As the Landschiff approached the target, its velocity increased. Positioned behind the tailpipe, plagued by the black noxious fumes, I tried to sprint (as if I were still on the track team back at Boalsburg High), but the flamethrower held me to a trot. Despite grief, fear, nausea, and carbon monoxide, my progress was punctuated by bursts of exultation. For my previous attack on the painting I’d armed myself with a mere canister of turpentine. Today I had on my side a motorized pillbox, a benevolent sorceress, and a flamethrower filled with supernatural distillates.

  With a ground-wrenching explosion, its thunder equal to any artillery shell that had ever burst on the Western Front, the Landschiff smashed through the south wall, doubtless ruining Ilona’s oils and Gaston’s watercolors. The vehicle continued on its way, leaving behind a gaping hole and, courtesy of the unfallen stones, a kind of Expressionist Roman arch. Rubble cascaded into my path, but I dodged each spinning chunk without losing my balance. The vehicle swerved to the left and, slipping between the vertical chains, crossed the elevator platform and continued moving. I charged into the breach, the blessed rain cooling my flesh, the cylinder gnawing my spine. Cautiously but quickly I climbed atop a mound of marble shards, then steeled myself for the second crash.

  Caligari’s nihilistic masterwork hung in its customary location. A sudden gust of wind tore the curtain away, exposing the painted surface of the canvas to the rain—or perhaps the picture, sensing our intentions, had deliberately shed its mantle. Now came the collision, the Landschiff slitting the canvas top to bottom and shattering the west wall. The stones, falling, carried Ecstatic Wisdom down with them. Mueller threw his machine into reverse, traveled backward over the platform, and stopped a meter short of the east wall. I descended from my hill and rushed toward the wounded picture. Firming my grip on the rubber hose, I positioned myself at the bottom edge of the stretcher frame, perpendicular to the canvas, and surveyed the beautiful marching recruits by the rain-veiled light of the Easter sun. They fixed me with their seductive stares. The voice of the nearest soldier filled my head.

  Come with us, my friend. Join our sacred brotherhood. Heed the call to arms. You need this battle. You desire it more than life itself.

  Naturally I would like to report that this exhortation did not affect me—and yet for the flicker of an instant I found myself in thrall to the painting’s consecrated nonsense.

  “Young Francis, wake up!” screamed Ilona.

  I aimed the nozzle and depressed the lever.

  “Auf Wiedersehen!” I told the soldier.

  Nothing happened. Again I depressed the lever. No flame came forth. I checked the igniter. The wick was dormant. My kingdom for a match.

  And suddenly Ilona was beside me, pulling a Streichhölzer box from her carpetbag. She lit a match. The rain extinguished it. She lit a second match, cupping it with her palm, and touched it to the wick. Within the igniter a glorious little flame flourished.

  I aimed the nozzle and depressed the lever. The propellant gas performed admirably, sending a gush of eager, enchanted, flammable oil coursing toward the burning wick. The rubber hose vibrated in my hands. Torrents of fire spiraled forth as if from the nostrils of Fafnir himself. Raindrops evaporated as they hit the white-hot nozzle. The pigments ignited, the gesso went up in flames, and the stretcher bars supplied kindling to the conflagration.

  Just then the museum doors flew back, admitting a mountainous janissary, black-bearded, furious, a pistol in his hand. Had this giant shot Werner? Gunned down Hauptmann Pochhammer? Had Werner or Pochhammer killed the other janissary? I’d heard no pistol reports, but the Landschiff’s engine might have drowned them out.

  Smoke rolled forth in billows so black and vast I could no longer see the painting. Sparks danced in the opaque cloud. My eyes, beset by ten thousand particulates, released streams of tears. I coughed convulsively. By summoning all my reserves of determination, I kept the lever depressed—never let the enemy regroup, Mueller had said—as I swept the nozzle back and forth, crisscrossing the canvas with rippling cords of flame.

  Just beyond the top of the painting, the smoke abruptly parted to reveal the bearded janissary, his pistol arm rigid and outstretched, as if he were fighting a duel. He took aim at my head. He fired. Ilona screamed. The projectile drilled through my skull and traversed my brain, killing me, then presumably exited through the back wall of my cranium, littering the gallery floor with petals of bone, though by then the bullet’s trajectory was for me a matter of complete indifference.

  I had never died before. While the living are well within their rights to rail against the many pathologies through which a person might become a corpse, oblivion itself is beyond evaluation. The lambent void enjoys no presence. The abyss is bereft of qualities. Mein Herr, Agent Thanatos has nothing to report.

  And yet in my case death’s requisite oblivion was curiously incomplete. For all the silence, pallor, and ethereality of my circumstances, I understood myself to be upright, spine straight, walking somewhere. In time I could perceive my surroundings: a fogbound bridge not unlike the setting of Edvard Munch’s The Scream. Arrayed in mist, a human figure hobbled toward me.

  “Mr. Wyndham?”

  So I’d also retained my sense of hearing, faint but functional.

  “Mr. Wyndham, is that you?”

  It was Hans Jedermann, holding his rifle in one hand, waving at me with the other.

  “Am I in fact dead?” I asked.

  “Yes, but your Doppelgänger is not. At present you inhabit a simulacrum of yourself. Follow me.”

  For what seemed like an hour Hans and I walked side by side through the fog, saying nothing. I’d had no idea the Scream bridge was so long. Eventually we came to an empty stretcher frame, tall and narrow like a clothier’s mirror.

  “Cross over, Mr. Wyndham,” said Hans. “Fräulein Wessels needs you.”

  “Will this take me to Kleinbrück?”

  “Cross over.”

  So I held my breath, stepped through the aperture . . .

  And stumbled into the nocturnal sitting room of my Träumenchen apartments. Haggard, drained, and doleful, Werner sat on the divan. The gas-lamps disclosed the usual art supplies strewn across the worktable: brushes, palette, knife, linseed oil, mustard pots filled with bewitched pigments. The casement window framed a gibbous moon and a scattering of stars.

  “Let me be the first to congratulate you,” said Werner. “You shut down Caligari’s war machine. Ecstatic Wisdom is nothing but a pile of ashes. Well done, Francis.”

  “Evidently the victory cost me my life.”

  Bit by bit, my sensorium was restored to me. I caught a whiff of linseed oil. Werner’s voice grew louder.

  “Blame that disaster on me if you wish,” he said. “The plan of attack was mostly my creation.”

  “Where’s Ilona?”

  Ignoring my question, Werner gestured toward the paint pots. “Conrad buried them under the sundial as she’d instructed him. I dug them up at her request. Their magic was obviously intact.”

  “I can’t believe that I’m . . .”

  “Alas, ‘dead’ is the correct word. Pochhammer and I easily intimidated the smaller janissary, but the other one broke away and ran into the ruined gallery. Not long after the giant put a bullet in your brain, Pochhammer shot him through the heart. Look behind you, Francis.”

  I turned and surveyed the stretcher frame, which from my present vantage displayed a taut canvas tacked to the bars. Poised on an easel, the painting confused me at first, but then I realized that, in leaving the uncanny bridge and entering the sitting room, I’d passed through a full-length portrait of myself. Ilona had captured my countenance in full: the mole on my jaw, the greenish tint of my irises, the little white scar above my lip—mement
o of a fall from a tree house. She’d dressed me in my customary blue flannel shirt and brown corduroy trousers. The paint was not yet dry.

  “What time is it?”

  “Eleven o’clock post meridiem,” said Werner, consulting his pocket watch. “Technically you’re one of those Easter resurrectees. As soon as Caligari saw the Landschiff, he started waving his pistol around and fulminating about the Hague Conventions. When Mueller informed him the machine was unarmed, Caligari kept on screaming, so the Major told him to go to hell, then drove off toward Luxembourg with Sergeant Görlitz. Shortly thereafter, Pochhammer left in the Mercedes.”

  “Where’s Ilona?” I asked again.

  “I understand your sense of urgency.”

  Werner led me out of my apartments, then down the corridor to the grand lobby. Inmates milled about, several in their delusional regalia—harlequin, highwayman, Queen Cleopatra. Upon entering the north wing, we strode past the troubadour tapestries to Conrad’s quarters. Werner knocked on the door. Conrad appeared instantly, a lit cigarette dangling from his lower lip, a cracked china teacup in his hand. He looked me up and down.

  “I never doubted she could bring you back.” He took a drag, tapped the ashes into the teacup, then ushered me into his foyer and along a gloomy hallway. “She loved you very much.”

  As I entered Conrad’s gas-lit back parlor, I was assailed by a cacophony of shrieks—my own, probably, but it sounded like a chorus. Could it be that Munch’s figure on the bridge, hands pressed against his cheeks and ears, was not screaming at all but instead sought to block out the whole mad, howling universe? Like Ophelia’s corpse floating down a river in Elsinore, Ilona lay on a velvet couch, arms folded across her breast. Her dead eyes were open. She wore her yellow blouse and gray Punjabi pants. Dropping to my knees, I kissed her cold lips, then took her hands in mine. I buried my face in her hair, which had never fully recovered from last year’s scissors attack.

  “The janissary shot her in the stomach,” said Werner. “Then Pochhammer killed the janissary.”

  “We wanted to take her to the sanitarium surgeon, but she insisted on finishing your portrait,” said Conrad. “She was in great pain. It was all entirely horrible and operatic.”

  “Ludwig, Pietro, and Gaston did the stretching and the priming,” said Werner, “and at noon she began turning you into a Farbenmensch. Shortly after sunset she applied the last stroke . . . and then she died.”

  For a full hour I sat on the rug beside Ilona, rocking back and forth, sobbing, keening, rubbing the mucus from my nose with Conrad’s handkerchief. My desolation engaged my whole body—ligaments, muscles, arteries, bones: I hadn’t realized grief was such an exhausting business.

  “Many months ago Ilona told me that one day she’d be compelled to paint my portrait.”

  “You don’t quite understand what she accomplished,” said Conrad. “Her interpretation of Francis Wyndham is more amazing than you realize.”

  He took me to a private gallery in the deepest reaches of his domain, then lit the lamps to disclose walls hung with full-color lithographed posters from the days he and Caligari had toured the countryside. See Giacomo the Somnambulist Swallow a Sword . . . Eat a Torch . . . Catch a Bullet in His Teeth. The centerpiece of the exhibit was the upright cabinet in which Giacomo had supposedly slept when not on exhibition, its dual lids meeting in a zigzag seam.

  Conrad opened the cabinet. Stiff, naked, and vertical, a male corpse of medium build occupied the compartment. Someone had pulled a brown jute bag over the head, giving the cadaver the appearance of a hanged criminal.

  “The janissary didn’t know how the flamethrower worked, so after he shot you, he opened the cylinder and poured the rest of the oil on your head,” said Conrad. “He applied a firebrand. Your face melted away from your skull. Then the janissary shot Ilona. Then Pochhammer put a bullet in his heart.”

  “So she painted me . . .”

  “From memory.”

  “The late Francis Wyndham had considerable ability,” I said, “but he could never have accomplished such a feat.”

  “Happily, his simulacrum needn’t duplicate Ilona’s achievement in every way,” said Conrad.

  “The students have been busy all day,” said Werner. “The canvas is stretched and primed. The gesso is almost dry. When do you wish to begin?”

  “Right after sunrise,” I said. “The light will be perfect.”

  I felt no particular need to pray, fast, or shave my head. What mattered was to activate whatever supernatural gifts my beloved creator had bestowed on me. Under Werner’s supervision, Ludwig, Pietro, and Gaston carried the closed cabinet into my sitting room. The space glowed with intimations of day. Ilona’s portrait of me was now propped against the casement. My students set the cabinet beside a blank, vertical canvas clamped to the easel.

  “I wish you hadn’t destroyed my watercolors,” said Gaston. “Or Fräulein Wessels’s spiderweb oils, for that matter.”

  “In war there is always collateral damage,” said Werner.

  “We ask your forgiveness,” I told the Grandmaster.

  “Move twenty: White dispatches a rook to queen one, and then his game begins falling apart,” said Gaston.

  After the students had exited the room, Conrad rotated the jigsaw-puzzle doors to reveal a perpendicular, open-eyed Ilona, lashed to my own earthly remains, my head still obscured by the jute bag. Paralyzed with horror, I stared mutely at the macabre tableau, then told my friends I couldn’t abide the thought of contemplating her corpse for a protracted interval. Conrad suggested a looking-glass. I gave my assent. Within the hour, through a clever deployment of alchemical fixtures from Caligari’s atelier, Conrad succeeded in setting up a circular mirror adjacent to the easel, so that, when I positioned myself between the canvas and the cabinet, Ilona’s face filled the glass.

  “Today you will be the equal of Munch, Cézanne, and Picasso,” said Werner.

  “And then you will astonish Paris with an apple,” said Conrad.

  My friends left me to my labors. With my graphite stick I drew her facial contours on the dried gesso, then sketched in the rest of her. I remembered how, on the afternoon when we’d first made love, she’d spoken of wanting a satin gown that matched her hair. And now an unexpected metaphysical opportunity had arisen.

  Hour after hour, palette in one hand, brush in the other, I worked without stopping, conjuring her lovely face. I made a point of fully restoring her exuberant tresses, using vermilion mixed with a dash of cadmium yellow. For her Grecian-style gown I employed the exact same hue. I gave my love her guileless but knowing smile.

  With the coming of dusk I transferred a daub of ultramarine from the palette to my smallest brush. I added an impossibly blue highlight to each iris, then stepped away from the canvas, weary but satisfied.

  “I need you,” I told the portrait. The image remained inert. “Come to me, my dearest.” No specter rippled the canvas. “I love you so very much.”

  Doubtless Farbenmensch sorcery required patience of its practitioners. I closed the cabinet doors, so that the mirror, reflecting the zigzag seam, suddenly seemed cracked. I dismantled the mirror rig, recorked the mustard pots, and planted my brushes in a jar of turpentine. From the icebox I obtained a bottle of Riesling (evidently Conrad had arranged for my larder to remain stocked), then poured and consumed a glass.

  I collapsed on the divan.

  I slept, dreaming of spiders and infinities and fearful symmetries.

  Shortly after midnight I awoke. She stood over me, her vermilion hair cascading down her bare shoulders, her satin gown cradled in her arms.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said.

  “Your portrait?”

  “That, too, but I meant the gown. The pain is gone from my stomach. Death is a condition I could learn to abide. Why did you flip my face?”

  “I had to use a mirror.”

  “Of course.”

  She dropped to her knees and kissed me fully on the lips.
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  “Can two Farbenmenschen do this?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  Again she kissed me.

  “It’s a distinct possibility,” I said.

  Thus it happened that, one soft April night in 1915, in a makeshift atelier on the ground floor of an insane asylum, and despite the couple’s lamentable ontological status, Eros was appeased, passions were spent, and love knew its hour.

  The following morning, shortly before noon, someone rapped four times on my door. H is for heaven, hell, hope, horror. I threw on a bathrobe. Ilona, dressed in a muslin chemise, followed me into the foyer.

  “Fräulein, it’s marvelous to see you,” said Werner, addressing Ilona as he and Conrad stepped over the threshold. “Is your pain. . . ?”

  “It’s gone. But then again, so is Ilona Wessels of Holstenwall. Francis made a satin gown for her Farbenmensch self.”

  “Face, hair, gown—I knew his brush was equal to the challenge,” said Conrad. “You’ve never looked more sublime.”

  “Sooner rather than later, we must review the dreadful events of Easter,” said Ilona.

  “Dear friends, I bring an invitation from Caligari,” said Conrad. “He wants us all to have coffee in his office at four o’clock.”

  “A month ago, Ilona and I granted him such a request,” I said, “and the results were disastrous.”

  “There will be no janissaries in the room,” said Conrad. “I’m to brew and serve the coffee. He surrendered his pistol to me. He says he has momentous news.”

  “I’m amenable to visiting Herr Direktor, but right now I must ask you both a favor,” said Ilona. “Francis’s sitting room still contains a cabinet holding certain distasteful memento mori. Please arrange for its incineration.”

  “I understand,” said Werner, retreating into the corridor.

  “I simply don’t want them around,” said Ilona.

  “I’ll put our Grandmaster and his friends on the job.”

  “It’s April,” said Conrad, joining Werner in the corridor. “The furnace is dormant.”