The Asylum of Dr. Caligari

by James Morrow

  “There’s turpentine in my classroom,” I said.

  Two hours later, the students appeared at my door. Saying not a word, they marched down the hallway and into the sitting room. Gaston grasped the narrow end of the cabinet. The paranoid and the space traveler lifted the bottom.

  “After today, you’ll never see us again,” Ilona told them.

  “I always liked your spiders, Ilona,” said Pietro. “You were an excellent teacher, Mr. Wyndham.”

  “Next stop, Andromeda,” said Commander Ruttluff of Die Erste Galaxisbrigade.

  “Move twenty-eight: White slides a pawn to queen four,” said Gaston. “Black deploys a bishop to king six—and then White resigns.”

  “With your permission, Mr. Wyndham,” said Ludwig, “I’d like to hang these portraits of you and Ilona in our classroom.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “But not just yet,” said Ilona.

  Later that afternoon my friends and I subjected ourselves to the typically distressing though never boring presence of Alessandro Caligari. The capitalist mystic was seated on the burgundy sofa, his hands resting on his perpendicular cane, peering at us from behind his black-rimmed spectacles. Werner, Ilona, and I slid into leather chairs before the teak-wood table. She now wore her vermilion gown. Conrad, as promised, poured the coffee.

  “Fräulein, I must confess I was quite moved by your Totentanz,” said Caligari.

  “Though not moved enough to spare it,” noted Ilona.

  “There is no percentage in pacifism, and yet antiwar sentiments will always enjoy a certain moral cachet,” said Caligari, sipping coffee. “I wanted you four to be the first to know I’ve resolved to stop filling soldiers’ minds with Kriegslust. There will be no sequel to Verzückte Weisheit.”

  “So what’s next on your agenda?” said Ilona. “Bombing kindergartens?”

  “From now on my energies will go exclusively into helping mental patients. Leutnant Slevoght, if you wish to once again practice art therapy here at Träumenchen, the position is yours.”

  “The greater the distance I can place between you and myself, Signore, the better,” said Werner.

  “Herr Röhrig, you may continue as my secretary for as long as you wish.”

  “Who can tell me the smallest unit of time?” said Conrad.

  “My father could have,” said Ilona.

  “In any event, Conrad and I are moving to Berlin,” said Werner. “We plan to open an art academy after the war ends.”

  “If you change your mind and paint another obscene picture,” I told Caligari, “I’ll destroy it just as I did Ecstatic Wisdom.”

  “No, you won’t. You’re living on borrowed time. ‘Living’ isn’t quite the right word, is it, Mr. Wyndham?”

  Ilona said, “So Herr Doktor finally got sick of all the blood on his hands . . .”

  “I was a war profiteer, not a war criminal,” said Caligari.

  “Is there a difference?” said Werner.

  “To my mind, yes. Alas, the generals and the princes don’t need me anymore. They probably never needed me. Simple appeals to glory, God, and xenophobia would surely have delivered eager regiments into their hands. Please don’t tell my customers that, or they’ll want their gold back.” Cesare pranced into the room and jumped into Caligari’s lap. The alienist set down his porcelain cup and stroked the cat. “Occasionally, when he’s on his game, a magician sees the world with great clarity. I’m sure you’ve had that experience, Fräulein.”

  “Not really, no,” said Ilona.

  “There are doors within doors, wheels within wheels, maps within maps,” said Caligari. “Germany is a state, France is a state, Britain, Russia, Austria-Hungary, and—poised to enter the war next month on the side of the Entente—my native Kingdom of Italy. But beneath those states lies a deeper state, the invisible continent of expediency, beloved of kings, clerics, commissars, and capitalists, who can always depend on it to pile up whatever dead bodies need piling up, and the whole remorseless machine keeps functioning regardless of whatever paintings anybody hangs in a fucking museum.”

  Borrowed time. Indeed. I could hear the portals of eternity opening, their hinges creaking in my ear.

  I glanced at Ilona. She heard them, too.

  “Not only am I something of a Cagliostro, I am also a Nostradamus,” said the alienist. “Would you like to know what’s to come in this transcendently meaningless war? Shall I tell you about the horrors of Verdun? With good reason it will be called the meatgrinder. The bloodletting scheduled to occur along the River Somme? Over a million casualties. Shall we call them Sommenambulists? Eventually Britain will start producing self-propelled pillboxes like that contraption you brought here on Sunday. Despite many mechanical problems, they’ll contribute prodigiously to the slaughter.”

  Ilona rested her cup on the table and stood up. “White resigns,” she said, sidling away from her chair.

  “Black resigns.” I rose and followed Ilona as she headed toward the door.

  “Vita brevis, ars longa,” said Werner, gaining his feet.

  “Late in 1918 an armistice will occur, and everyone will spend the next several years drafting and signing treaties,” said Caligari, his voice sliding up and down in piercing glissandos, “until at long last the architects of the Great War can look back on their many accomplishments: a devastated France, a demoralized Britain, a ransacked Belgium, a ruined Germany, a receiving line of corpses stretching from Armentières to Zanzibar!”

  “I’m pleased to hear you’re setting down your brush,” Werner told Caligari. “You might be a competent sorcerer”—he marched across the salon—“but you’ve sullied enough canvases with your ersatz Expressionism.”

  “I cannot bring myself to say, ‘Fare thee well, Alessandro,’ but neither do I wish you ill,” Conrad informed Caligari before joining the rest of us in the doorway. “Keep treating your patients through hypnotism and heteropathy and whatever else seems to work, and God may forgive you yet.”

  “The annexation of Weizenstaat by Luxembourg in compensation for the German occupation!” Caligari persisted, using his cane to lever himself off the divan. The cat vaulted from his lap and landed on the table. “The delivery of Russia into the hands of ideologically deluded fanatics! The ascent of mindless nationalism and virulent anti-Semitism following the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire! The creation of an artificially sectioned and perpetually chaotic Near East following the fall of the Ottoman Empire!”

  Before escaping from Herr Direktor’s domain, I glanced over my shoulder in time to see him raise his arm high and roil the air with his cane.

  “And then, finally, planted in the soil of a distracted Europe and cultivated by professional psychopaths, the seeds of a second worldwide conflagration, destined to surpass the carnage quotient established by the first!”

  As our sorrowful quartet descended to the grand lobby, I found myself taking a certain cold comfort in knowing that the prototype Francis Wyndham, the person of whom I was a mere aesthetic replica, was in no way privy to my present unenviable circumstances. Between his inert nothingness and my absurd somethingness lay only a welter of broken connections—fallen bridges, collapsed trestles, flooded roads, garbled syntax. It was a long, long way to Tipperary.

  Upon reaching my bedroom, Ilona and I opened the closet and removed our two favorite exemplars of the Wessels-Wyndham theory of nonpictorial art. My particular effort, Principia Insaniam, suggested to me an ineffable but sensual encounter between a polyhedron and a tesseract. Ilona’s canvas, Serenade No. 6, evoked foam dancing atop a love potion so powerful it could reconcile the universe to itself.

  Clutching our canvases, we proceeded to the sitting room, where Werner and Conrad awaited us. Ilona’s portrait of Francis Wyndham was still tilted against the casement. My portrait of her yet graced the easel. We laid our experiments in abstraction on the worktable.

  “These are astonishing,” said Werner, his palms hovering above the canvases as if to
bless them.

  “What are they supposed to be?” asked Conrad.

  “They’re supposed to be being,” said Ilona.

  “Of course,” said Conrad, scowling.

  “I dare say, Ilona has founded a new school of art,” I said.

  “Do you intend to take them with you?” asked Werner.

  “Where we’re going, pleasure is unknown,” said Ilona, shaking her head. She pointed to Serenade No. 6. “Consider this my gift to you, Herr Slevoght.”

  “And Principia Insaniam is my gift to you,” I told Conrad.

  “Both paintings will enter the curriculum of the Slevoght-Röhrig Academy of Fine Arts,” said Werner. “Goodbye, Fräulein.” He kissed Ilona on the brow, then turned to me and squeezed my shoulder. “ ‘And there’s a law that things crawl off in the manner of snakes,’ ” he recited, “ ‘prophetically, dreaming on the hills of heaven.’ ”

  Saying nothing, Conrad gave Ilona, then myself, a bony embrace.

  I stroked Ilona’s bounteous hair. She kissed me, then stepped through her portrait and vanished. I closed my eyes, heaved a sigh, and, pressing my face against the other canvas . . .

  Entered the Farbenmenschen realm once more. I took Ilona’s hand, though I couldn’t feel her skin. Limned by an incandescent sunset, the fogbound bridge stretched to an unreachable horizon.

  Ambling slowly forward, arm in arm, we passed other figures, but their beauty was lost on us, apprehension without appreciation. A girl with a pearl earring. A seated boy pulling a thorn from his foot. A sinewy young warrior balancing a sling on his shoulder. A sword-wielding woman and her maidservant absconding with a Babylonian general’s head. A French postman with a forked beard. An aristocratic lady cradling a white weasel. A sorority of Post-Impressionist bathers. A cluster of Cubist demoiselles from Avignon. A nude descending a staircase.

  As we continued our journey, Ilona and I grew benumbed by the knowledge that this endless span would never bring us anything beyond a melancholy procession of exquisite ghosts.

  “Vita brevis, pons longa,” I said. “Life is short, but the bridge is forever.”

  “White resigns,” said Ilona.

  “Black resigns,” I said.

  “White resigns, ad infinitum.”

  “Black does the same.”

  And yet, after a while, we agreed that eternity was a cut above oblivion. There was no hellfire in this place, nor hunger. We decided to remain. Call us obstinate shadows, insensate phantoms, angels without expectations. Call us the children of the bridge. We are walking there still.

  Having arrived on the planet in 1947, James Morrow spent his adolescence in Hillside Cemetery, not far from his birthplace in Philadelphia, pursuing his passion for 8mm genre moviemaking. Before going off to college, he and his friends used their favorite graveyard location for a half dozen fantasy and horror films, including adaptations of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “The Tell-Tale Heart.”

  After receiving degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University, Morrow redirected his storytelling energies toward the production of satiric novels and stories. His acerbic assessment of the nuclear arms race, This Is the Way the World Ends, was a Nebula Award finalist and the BBC’s selection as best SF novel of 1986. His next dark comedy, Only Begotten Daughter, chronicling the escapades of Jesus’s divine half-sister in contemporary Atlantic City, won the World Fantasy Award and the animosity of theocrats everywhere.

  Throughout the 1990s, Morrow devoted his energies to killing God, an endeavor he pursued through three interconnected novels: Towing Jehovah (World Fantasy Award), Blameless in Abaddon (New York Times Notable Book), and The Eternal Footman (Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire finalist). Having grown sick of his Creator, and vice-versa, the author next attempted to dramatize the birth of the scientific worldview. Critic Janet Maslin called The Last Witchfinder “provocative book-club bait” and “an inventive feat.” A thematic sequel, The Philosopher’s Apprentice, was praised by NPR as “an ingenious riff on Frankenstein.” Morrow’s most recent irreverent epic, Galápagos Regained, narrates the adventures of Charles Darwin’s fictional zookeeper.

  The author’s acclaimed cycle of stand-alone novellas includes City of Truth (Nebula Award), Shambling Towards Hiroshima (Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award), and The Madonna and the Starship. Morrow’s work has been translated into thirteen languages. He lives in State College, Pennsylvania, with his wife, Kathryn, and two enigmatic dogs.