Wednesday, February 22, 2017

The Monogram Monograph: Part I

Karl Colomb Kessler always had such difficulty believing that this was a real psychiatrist's office, and not due to the issues that brought him here. Long ago he had surmised that there was too much optimism in this post-War period. During the War, people were less naive, and would disbelieve that, in the long run of things, very little progress had been made in the field of psychology, comparatively. Long ago they had imprisoned people in Bedlam—a name now so infamous it was synonymous with Hell. While he was certain it was merely his usual luck that brought him here and not an inevitability in the offices of the help he needed, he saw Kessler as the last ghost of the infamous hospital at its absolute worst. He had no idea whether or not Dr. Dran had intentionally smeared gasoline or some other such fluid over the bare bulb that lit the grungy room they sat in. Gas was expensive, even after the end of rationing, and evidently light-bulbs, good ones at least, were expensive too. Whatever was on that bulb made the whole room gasoline-orange where there was light, and there wasn't much light to speak of.

The orange light made everything look like a nightmare. A Halloween nightmare, where one is out trick-or-treating and the streets are pinched too tight...and none of the houses are lit. It's just you, all alone in the dark, but with the magic of the night still in the air. Halloween will never leave you, until midnight strikes and November 1st begins. So it's not good to be alone and vulnerable on the holiday's streets after the sun goes down.

The bent, warped, too-cramped look of the room was replicated on the face of Oliver Dran. His face flickered like a caricature on a jack-o-lantern of a washed-up horror film star. He was more like a lamp in the night than a man. He was hard to take seriously in both his poverty and his appearance. And yet all the same he had helped him make great progress on his dreams. He could leave the house for things besides his appointments; he could wait in public without crying or choking himself. He could get out of bed in the mornings. There was just one problem they kept running into: Oliver refused to give ground and confess that there had once been a Virginia.

That was where they were today. Kessler couldn't have had anything but a bad day thus far. His work day had gone poorly, and it had done nothing less than break down that which he'd built up. This sort of mess, the one in his head, was cyclical, and yet unpredictable—ups and downs were something everyone had, but to stumble into the Marianas Trench from the peak of Everest was different. Sometimes he remembered things like long-term career goals, and forgot the grinding chittering pain that came from the haunt of failure. He was no longer fully crippled—though it was still a fitting term in a sense. Times were shaping up and even if it was still all just like being thrown in Bedlam, piss on the floor and maggots in the bread,1 “cripple” was becoming a bad word, and that was good. It was used all the time as an insult, so much that its neutrality was in constantly question, at least to him. And yet he was familiar with the feeling of watching dreams float by like clouds. A useless hobby after a certain age. From those who brought him the embarrassment that made him sob and made them all call him “goddamn loonie” he'd learned that a certain vital essence faded after too many years of neglect of the self. The ego was a hungry bitch, at the heels, begging for scraps, and biting you if you let it go hungry for too long.

He knew all this, and yet the walls were still up too high. He was here, trapped in a state that stoned their damn cripples, under a gasoline-orange light besides a caricature on a pumpkin. Talking about Virginia, and not even remembering what went wrong today, or what his job was.

“Let's go over your family again. Do you want that? It would be as per Dr. Freud's theories...”

“No.” The room bent and warped like old wood under rain.

“Again, it would stand to reason that you would desire a strong feminine presence in your life,” Dr. Dran said frankly. “You lacked a mother to raise you. You were abandoned at birth, the illegitimate child of a burglar by the name of Clarence Clancy Clementine.”

“And he incidentally chose to give me my alliterative name in mockery of the cruelty of his own,” Kessler whispered. “So Virginia is not my wife, but my mother?”

“Perhaps.”

“We've been at this too long for 'perhaps.'” His tone was tired.

Maybe then Virginia is another of your selves. Another of the inhabitants of your head, Karl.” His tone was accusative.

Kessler tensed up. He knew that the answer was in yet another dream-therapy session—but he didn't want to go under when Oliver was agitated, in case his feelings affected how he treated Kessler in such a vulnerable state. He was a short-tempered man and, in some sense, he was all that Kessler had. A cheap office meant cheap bills. Wherever it was that he worked (for all it mattered), it did not pay well. Probably because of his condition. He did have to call out sick quite often.

“So you say I have a feminine side.”

“We all do, Karl.”

“But I am a man. I am sure of that. And all of the other me's, which the walls keep away from me, they're all men, too. Emil Nardo, Frederick Brenner. Dr. Melcher.” His voice slipped over that last name a bit.

“Yes, the Good Doctor,” Dran said. “And his two...alter egos.”

“Yes, in the classical sense. Nardo and Brenner are like Melcher's doubles, like Poe's 'William Wilson'...or else disguises.”

“Your adversary had disguises, doubles...all alternate versions of himself. And in turn, alternate versions of you.”

“Yes. Because the walls keep Me fragmented.”

Dr. Dran clicked his pen. “I write 'Walls' in capital letters in my notebook, Mr. Kessler.”

“Well, don't.”

“Why?”

“Capital letters mean something is special. Don't give the Walls any more power than they deserve.” And he realized how he'd pronounced “Walls.” “Oh, goddamnit.”

“You know, walls can be good, Karl. They can keep us safe sometimes. We all have them.”

But I know these Walls aren't the good kind. They were not part of my...of the...original Creation.”

The horrible face frowned. “The Creation? Now it sounds like we're getting in Biblical territory. Angels and demons.”

Kessler sighed. There was no calming Dran now. He would just have to put himself in the hands of fate, and hope that Dran would accept the honesty of his dreams and their meanings, where he would not listen to his waking self.

But they were going in circles again, as they always did. That was the truth he was afraid to face; this was a room for realizing such truths, and he was always alone when he made realizations. Once more they built Walls between them. Once more they would see the same men they always saw: Frederick Brenner, high-voiced and kindly-seeming but a deadly killer; Dr. Melcher, a Nazi and butcher of flesh, monstrous in all forms, the king of the three; and Emil Nardo, a savage, skeletal mobster, also a Nazi, his face crossed by long vertical lines, his eyes nearly triangular and his teeth cut to scraggly points. They each had stories, and these stories were what kept Kessler saying the same things over and over again, to each identical customer that passed the front of his square and standard desk. (That was what he did for work!)

He knew every inch of the stories of the dreams at this point. Sometimes it was obvious where the dreams spawned the fears and anxieties of his waking life, but on other occasions they just didn't mesh. They seemed part of an external context, a sequence of events from outside, like movies were. He knew the stories of the movies of his dreams.

Frederick Brenner had once managed a homeless shelter in the Bowery neighborhood of New York, using it as a front to recruit people for a gang that he ran. On top of that, he employed a former scientist who knew the secrets of life and death—apparently the money from his criminal profits were used to fund research on creating zombies. (Each of these dreams were in black and white, he and Dran had determined, and each seemed pass roughly an hour.) Then there was Nardo, who began life merely as a stage magician, until he was discovered to be a valuable agent for the Nazis. When he turned to being boss of a gang of Nazis, he had a couple of run-ins with a gang of boys from the East Side of New York, who undid his plans that involved faking hauntings for various purposes. Dr. Melcher, then, started off a mysterious killer of American industrialists. His motives were unknown until slowly it transpired that he had been affiliated with the Nazis, and served as a plastic surgeon operating on members of the Black Dragon Society, turning these Japanese agents into white men. The Dragons betrayed him and threw him in prison, though he kept his surgical tools; using these he had traded places with one of the dream-selves Kessler had of himself, a prisoner of the Black Dragons called Colomb. That dream ended with Colomb being killed by the Black Dragons, while the evil Melcher roamed free with his name and face, taking vengeance on the Dragons one by one but with a plundered face.

And that was the hitch they kept trying to figure out. Karl really was all of these men. Brenner had another name, Karl Wagner, who was a good husband and law-abiding citizen when he wasn't down in the Bowery. He remembered Nardo's career as a magician, a legitimate one, until he was slowly twisted by need and hate into Emil Nardo, thumb-breaker and enemy of democracy. And of course he had been Colomb.

In many of the dreams he was Charles Kessler, a kindly man whose wife had run away from him. But he still saw her, and seeing her overwhelmed mind...whenever her face struck his eyes, he would be compelled to go out...and kill...

He woke up loving the woman whose face brought that impulse to him. He knew her, and she had been his. But at the same time, the loneliness of her absence was enough to begin filling his mind with mental illness's archetypical voices. The quiet but forceful urges to make the dreams happen in reality. It was hatred for that loneliness; and hatred against the self for hearing the voices. For letting the voices come over him and make him abnormal.

Here he was, summarizing them as if they were movies. He even had titles for some of these films. Bowery at Midnight for Brenner/Wagner. Emil Nardo was captured in Spooks Run Wild and Ghosts On the Loose (named for the ghosts he faked as part of his Axis missions). And Melcher/Colomb was from Black Dragons. Charles Kessler was the subject of Invisible Ghost, which had been ripe for interpretation—Dran reasoned, probably correctly, that “Charles” was the “true” Kessler, as shown by sharing his surname, and therefore Kessler considered himself an “invisible ghost” of some kind...likely a social one, hidden away by the impulses of his illness.

Anyway. He had meant to focus on the fact that Virginia had been real.

She had to have been. He was a creative man but he hadn't ever known a woman like her; he couldn't carve her smile or make up her laugh. He had only forgotten her eyes, but that was a small price to pay to remember the rest of her. She broke his repetition. She was always fresh and new and promising unknown adventures.

To have one's mind and friends and family and coworkers all say that one's wife wasn't real was too much. He needed help.

He closed his eyes. All this had passed in a moment, and now, Oliver Dran cleared his throat to propose another hypnotism session, to again look back at the faces of the triumvirate, or to strangle Virginia and everyone else as Charles. And to remember the thing that appeared at the end of every dream. The Monogram.

The Monogram was a combined symbol, “A” and “B” on top of each other, in what Dran had perplexingly called a syzygy. It always appeared for a single moment, a single frame, at the end of the dreams. As if it was the name of the company that produced his dreams. In a metaphorical way, he figured it was his mind knowing the answer but only telling him in code. Such was the way of dreams, as per stereotype and all else.

Karl wasn't an artist by even the farthest stretches of his fevered imagination, but he'd tried to draw what he'd seen all the same, on a napkin in a diner one hazy early morning:


Not a good drawing at all. Not in any world of an infinitely variable Existence.

But it was a representation of what he saw, right down to the stars at the border. “A” and “B.” Any letter could mean anything; that was the premise of algebra and literature alike. But it was the key, and he just needed to find a way to turn it.

Before Dran could speak, Kessler turned his head and spoke hurriedly: “Oliver, I'm sorry, but I think I would like to look at an alternative provider.”

Dran froze, his eyebrows narrowing. “Fine. I'll write you a recommendation. The number for my associate, Dr. Dexter.”

“First name?”

Dran didn't reply, at least to that. “He is another dream-hypnotist—but he is the man who taught me.”

“What was his name again?”

Dran growled. “Dr. Dexter.”

Kessler's mind flashed back to something he was sure had reality to it: “Wasn't there was a Dr. Dexter who...subjected himself to inter-species hormone transplants? He began to transform into some sort of ape-man, or something similar...”

“That sounds like merely one of your dreams, Mr. Kessler. Please take this note—call upon me again only if it is a matter of grave importance.”

Before Kessler knew it, a psychiatric relationship of some years came to a close. He was in the sprawling gray hallway of the apartment complex for Dran's now-locked office.

He was trying to remember where he had heard the name Dexter. Another name was coming back to him now, at light-speed: another doctor, James—James Brew—

“Agh!”

The interruption jarred the thought loose, and his long hours of sleeplessness made the name slip away from him. The interruption was a man who appeared suddenly before him. He had an inoffensive look to him, being somewhat short. What was more was that he was scrawny, with thick spectacles and an unseemly mustache. He was grinning eagerly at the sight of Kessler.

“I'm Mr. Marvel,” he said.

<< Prologue                                                                                                                        Part II >>
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1. In Bedlam (more properly Bethlehem Royal Hospital), there was an emphasis on vegetable-poor diets due to beliefs in humorism at the time, along with infections spreading as a result of chaffing from restraints. Patients would become further traumatized and physically emaciated as a result of this; doomed in many cases never to recover. Conditions such as these, with elaborations from 20th Century technology and “sensibility,” are still employed in hospitals designed to ostensibly cure patients with autistic disorders and or who are homosexuals. - Dr. Kruthers

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