Broken Necks/The Psychological Phantom

Curiosity led me to visit an ill-smelling rooming house in a broken part of the town where I had learned lived a man named Diennik. A few years ago this man had been released from the state penitentiary where he had been a prisoner for eleven years. His release had followed the discovery by the police that he was innocent of the crime for which he had been locked away.

The manner in which the police learned of Diennik’s innocence is in itself a very strange story. A middle-aged man named Breitschide, arrested on suspicion of having robbed a grocery store, announced during a stern interrogation by the police that he was unable to bear the burden of his guilt any longer. He was innocent of robbing the grocery store, but fifteen years ago he had committed a series of crimes for which a man named Diennik had been arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced to twenty-five years in jail. The crimes had been the result of an abnormality in his nature. He had felt impelled to molest young women in the street at night and for a year had terrorized a lonely neighborhood by attempting to rape every unescorted girl who passed in the dark highways.

For these attempts Diennik, an unmarried carpenter living and working in a basement in the district, had been arrested and identified by the victims. Breitschide explained to the police that the abnormality which had made a criminal of him had left his nature and that, having become religious, he felt unable to live without expiating his early wrongs, among which he numbered as the greatest the unjust imprisonment of Diennik. In his confessions Breitschide supplied the police with intimate details of his crimes, which, corroborated by his astonished victims, removed all doubt of the man’s guilt.

. . . . . . ..

I expected to find in Diennik a man of strange bitterness. Or perhaps, I thought, as I walked to the house in which he lived, he will have found a curious understanding of life through the terrible injustice which it had offered him.

He was, fortunately, in his room—an unsavory cubby hole overlooking an alley. It was evening. He opened the door to me—the first visitor who had ever knocked on it — with neither surprise nor curiosity in his face. He was a man of fifty, undersized and grey. His hands were the only vital looking part of him. They were large and fully developed and would have seemed more natural had they belonged to a man much heavier and stronger than Diennik.

I found it difficult to talk to him. He sat on the edge of a dirty bed and gave me no attention. So I paused and lighted a pipe and meditated that this man had been in prison for eleven years and like all humans lived more in the past than the present. Thinking this I began to ask him questions about his life as a prisoner and his thin, whitened face responded with a glint of enthusiasm.

After he had mumbled for some time a number of uninteresting remarks concerning the routine of his life in jail, the tasks to which he had been set, the hour at which he had risen, eaten and retired, I asked him:

"But what did you feel during those years? You knew you were innocent and that an injustice had been done you?"

To this he made no answer. I continued:

"Did you grow angry when you thought of your innocence? Or did you become reconciled to the fact that something had been done to you that was wrong and unfair?"

His near-sighted eyes became filled with confusion and his large hands began to grow restless as they lay on his knees. I felt that, strangely enough, he resented this kind of questioning and I thought at the moment that his hatred of society was so intense that he could not bear the spoken thought of it. I repeated to him Breitschide’s confession and sought to point out to him that the world was now willing to make amends for its cruelty and that everyone who knew him considered him an unhappy and unfortunate man whose life had been stupidly violated by his fellows.

During my talk Diennik’s confusion increased. His small, watery eyes blinked and a frown wrinkled his forehead. I paused, realizing that he was sitting before me in a curious helplessness, as if I were an affliction from which there was no escape. At length he interrupted me. He began to chuckle and to exclaim repeatedly:

adeir dekode Welle

His eyes now grew shrewd and regarded me with caution and amusement.

"You don’t know nothin',"? he said. "Go on. What are you tryin' to do? Make me squawk and go back to the stir? Say, I got your number, Bill."

These words surprised me. They seemed to come from someone other than the wizened grey-faced man sitting on the dirty bed. I assured him that I, as well as every one else, believed in his innocence and again he interrupted me.

"They do, huh? Well, they don’t know nothin'," he said and became sullenly silent.

He looked at me closely for a few minutes and then stood up.

"Get out of here," he cried. "I got your number. Go on, get out."

I stood up and answered, "So you are really guilty of the crimes?"

"That’s all right, whether I am or not," he went on. "Go on. Leave me alone. Leave me alone, will you?"

His voice had dropped into a whine, and his eyes were again filled with a strange confusion. I left the room and heard him locking the door from the inside. On the way down the stairs I met the landlady and spoke to her. She told me that the old fellow was a little queer and that he was hard to talk to.

"He's got funny ideas," she said mysteriously and tapped her forehead with her finger.

When I had arrived in the street the secret this man held in his head came to me. His manner as well as his words repeated itself in my mind and I saw that Diennik, who had spent eleven years in jail for crimes he had never committed, had become unbalanced. He had been able to survive the injustice society had inflicted upon him only by succumbing to the illusion that he was guilty of the crimes for which he had been imprisoned. The innocent Diennik had become a phantom and during the years of loneliness the poor man had yielded himself to a delusion. Now, released and free once more, the delusion still persisted. His own character had collapsed and evaporated under the assault and there was left a creature who believed in the false identity that had been given him and who, since there is nothing as mysterious as human nature, had grown proud of it.