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.
---
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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