Madhouse Fog

by Sean Carswell

  “You go into advertising?” I remembered this much about Dr. Watson from my first conversation with Walters.

  “Exactly. That’s exactly what he did. He revolutionized advertising. At first, when he was a researcher and academic, he’d been focusing on controlling human behavior for therapeutic reasons: finding ways to quell the anger, the frustration, the meanness, the petty jealousies, and backbiting. When he got into advertising, he shifted gears. He realized that he could use this meanness, these petty jealousies to sell products. He set up advertising in essentially two stages: first, you make the consumer feel as if what he has isn’t good enough, make him suddenly worry about things that otherwise wouldn’t matter at all in life: dandruff and ring around the collar and what your car says about who you are. Second, you offer a simple solution. Make the consumer feel as if he’s forever one purchase away from happiness.”

  I thought of my wind-up bird, always a breath away from his imaginary worm, perpetually doomed to back flip. I translated this into terms Walters would recognize. “Like a donkey going after a carrot on a stick.”

  “Exactly. It’s so simple, now. We all know it. But fifty, sixty years ago, it was revolutionary. And that leads us to the problem of today: we all know it. Advertising has become an accepted lie. No one believes it any more. The only way advertising agencies can get through to people is with a constant barrage of ads.”

  “Throw so much shit against the wall that some of it has to stick.”

  “If you want to be vulgar about it, yes. That’s exactly it. But that leaves advertising professionals like me in a bind. It’s too inexact. People start to know better than to feel a specific shame, that their clothes are too cheap, for instance, or that their teeth are too yellow. Instead, we all start to feel a more general form of inadequacy. We feel vaguely like losers, but we can’t place why. This general feeling does leave the typical consumer more vulnerable to advertising, but not necessarily vulnerable to what we’re trying to sell. This is the problem. Advertising needs a new paradigm.”

  “And so you’re looking to me?”

  “Sure. Why not? You. Dr. Bishop. Maybe you’re on to something.”

  “You know she’s trying to talk telepathically with animals?” I said. Of course, Dr. Benengeli and Eric had both corrected me about this, told me that it wasn’t telepathy, exactly. I couldn’t follow what it was supposed to be instead. I figured using the word “telepathy” would make Walters see the foolishness of what he was up to. I added, “You know that, don’t you?”

  “Come on,” Walters said. “You’re not stupid.”

  “I just don’t understand. I don’t know what you’re after.”

  “I’m after Dr. Bishop’s research.”

  “But why?”

  Walters wagged a finger in my general direction. “It’s probably nothing. Think of it this way: the money I’m giving you amounts to about the salary of an entry-level researcher. If what you give me doesn’t pan out, no big deal. I’m just asking you to give the research to me.”

  “Then why all the theatrics? The muscle man, stalking my bike ride, snooping around my personal life. Is this how you treat your entry-level researchers?”

  “Come on,” Walters said again. “You’re not stupid.”

  But I did feel a little stupid. Or at least like I needed more information. Walters raised his smoky sunglasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. He kept his eyes closed as he did this. He lowered the glasses again. Silence washed over us.

  The morning’s first surfer walked along the beach below us. The soft-top board he carried and his choice to surf these waves that closed out so quickly indicated to me that he was a beginner. He wore the logo of his wetsuit manufacturer on his chest, carried the logo of his surfboard maker on the top of his board. I looked around, at my shoes and the logos there, at the long, black car and the BMW logos stuck to the hood and trunk, at the portajohn alongside the PCH and the logo and phone number of the portajohn company that supplied it. Even my bicycle was plastered with logos. I’d stuck bumper stickers of bands I liked over the brand name of the bike, but really, I’d just substituted one advertisement for another. So even here, a mile in any direction away from anything but the road and the beach and the boulders and the train tracks, advertisements papered the landscape in any direction I chose to look. A cool ocean breeze swept across my bare calves. I shivered.

  Walters made a whistle out of his thumb and index finger, and he whistled. Ape Man climbed out of the driver’s seat. I remembered Walters’ words: he’s good at making people bleed internally. Ape Man said, “Yes, Boss.”

  Walters said, “Let the dog use the bathroom before we go.”

  “Yes, Boss.”

  Ape Man’s ass hung out of the open doorway of the car as he grabbed something. He clumped over to us, the soles of his Doc Martens scraping the gravel, the bottoms of his jeans rolled up. In his right hand, he lugged a dog carrier.

  “Take the dog down to the beach,” Walters said.

  Ape Man climbed down the boulders, quick and graceful despite how steep the boulder wall was and how off-balance the dog carrier made him.

  Walters reached into the inside pocket of his jacket. He pulled from it an envelope, opened the envelope, and handed me the white sliver of paper from inside. It was the receipt I’d sent him for his donation to the hospital.

  Walters said, “Of course, you recognize this.”

  “You should keep it,” I said. “For tax purposes.”

  Walters’ hands rested on his lap. He did not reach for the receipt. He said, “That ten thousand dollars was not a donation. You knew that. If you want to give it away, that’s your prerogative. I can find other ways to motivate you.” He pointed at the beach in front of him. A wave stood up and crashed. The whitewater tumbled over the beginner surfer and his soft-top board. He rolled over and lost grip of his board. It bounced in the water.

  Surely, this wasn’t the scene Walters intended to show me. I scanned the shoreline. Off to my right, Ape Man tossed a tennis ball in a short arc and caught it again. The dog carrier sat at his feet. Paw prints led away from the carrier, over to the boulder wall. The dog stood there, one leg propped up, a stream of urine bouncing off the rocks. He was unmistakable. Clint Dempsey.

  My left arm ached for a phantom ball to throw to him. I asked the obvious question. The one I knew the answer to:

  “You stole my dog?”

  “Of course not. I bought him.”

  “How?”

  Walters pointed at the ocean in front of him, ostensibly meant to indicate Ape Man below us and to the right. Ape Man walked away from the carrier. Clint Dempsey finished his business and ran to Ape Man’s feet. Ape Man rolled the ball into the carrier. Clint Dempsey chased it down, going all the way inside the carrier to get the ball. Ape Man raced behind Clint Dempsey and locked the dog into the carrier. Ape Man made his way back toward us.

  “I sent my nephew up to Fresno. He met your wife. He said she was quite a beauty, by the way. His exact words, I believe, were ‘She was one fine piece of ass.’ But there’s no need to get vulgar. Regardless, a few hundred dollars was all it took to separate her from your dog.”

  Just to torture myself, I asked, “How many hundred?” I guess I had to know how much Clint Dempsey was worth to her: the price of a new cashmere sweater or a new bicycle or a round-trip, first-class plane ticket to Hawaii.

  Walters winced. I caught him off guard and he seemed to be thinking through his response. “Well,” he said softly, as if he pitied me. “Actually, only one hundred.”

  Damn it. She sold Clint Dempsey for the price of her monthly cell phone bill. I would’ve doubled that. I would’ve tripled it. Hell, I would’ve given her Walters’ whole envelope full of Franklins to have my dog back.

  Ape Man’s boots clunked off the boulders as he climbed up again. Walters stood and folded the towel.

  “The deal is simple. We’ll have lunch in two weeks. It’s on me, once again. If you give m
e information on Dr. Bishop’s research, I’ll give you back your dog. If you don’t give me the information, my nephew will kill him.” Walters extended his white plastic cane with a quick flick of the wrist. He stepped off his flat boulder with confidence and walked over to the long black car, his white cane fluttering inches above the ground. Ape Man and Clint Dempsey met him there.

  I wondered for a second whether or not I could jump Ape Man and get my dog. I took another second trying to come up with a plan. In the third second, the doors of the long black BMW were closed and the engine started.

  They drove south down the ribbon of road, vanishing into a wall of fog enveloping the railroad bridge. I unlocked my bike and picked up my ride from where I’d left off.

  13

  “Charles!”

  My name bounced off the concrete walls, echoing down the hallway of the Williams Building’s third-and-a-half floor. At first, I was sure I’d imagined it. No one uses my first name on hospital grounds. Then I heard it a second time: “Charles!” Some things can be striking in their reality. There was something in the tone of that voice calling out my name. A ring of fear or panic. Wind striking a vocal chord to sound a slight alarm. I paused outside the interns’ lounge and looked to my right. No natural light hit the hallway at this point in the building, only the shroud of yellow fluorescents that flickered the same, day or night. The person connected to that voice was Lola Diaz.

  I turned to face her.

  “Oh my god. Get me out of this building.” She rushed toward me, her wooden sandals clomping on the concrete floor, the plastic sunflowers on the sandal straps in a race for daylight.

  I put out my hand, gently, carefully, always a little skittish about touching a patient at all, even if the touch is only on the shoulder, even if said patient is the second woman I ever loved. My fingers rested on Lola’s slick, shiny blouse.

  Lola took two deep breaths, her eyes closing, mascara tearfully sliding into the grooves of nascent crow’s-feet, her chest rising and falling with the bellows of her lungs. She said, “I thought I’d never find my way out of here. I’ve been wandering around these halls for an hour, going up and down stairways and getting in and out of elevators. I’m so lost. What’s half a floor? How does a building have four and a half floors?”

  The Williams Building actually had nine floors, counting the basement. I didn’t tell Lola this. She was confused enough as it was.

  “Please tell me you know the way out of here.”

  “I know the way out of here,” I said.

  Lola opened her eyes and smiled, the corners of her mouth twitching, unsure whether or not this smile was a little premature. I turned and walked her through the interns’ lounge and to the staircase that led to the exit. Lola set one sunflower-sandaled foot on the first step down. “Are you sure you know where you’re going?”

  I nodded and pointed at the yellow flickering hallway behind me. “My office is on the third and a half floor. I know this building pretty well.”

  “Third and a half floor? How?”

  “It’s a strange building,” I said. “But you already know that.”

  “I wasn’t here looking for you,” she said, her words falling flat from her mouth.

  I took her denial the way we all take denials offered in response to unasked questions. I said, “Okay.”

  We stood in the dead air of the older half of the Williams Building. A few seconds passed. Half a minute. She set her other sunflower-sandaled foot to moving. We climbed down the stairs, across the lobby, and out through the entranceway.

  As soon as the sunlight hit Lola, she was a new person. Her tension evaporated. Her hunched shoulders and lowered glance bloomed open. A smile grew on her face. Even her sunflower sandals seemed to perk up. “I’m so glad I’m out of that building,” she sighed. “You don’t know.”

  She kept walking. I paused. My lunch hour was over and it was time to get back to work. Not that the afternoon promised much. I had to check my email, though likely there was nothing pressing. I had to… Well, I didn’t really have to do anything. I’d planned on shutting my office door, leaning back in my wooden chair, propping my feet on the windowsill, and whiling away the afternoon with a paperback. Still, I half-turned and said, “I, uh…”

  “Are you busy? Do you have a little time to take a walk with me?”

  I thought to lie, but really, the afternoon promised me nothing more than time and I would’ve felt sinister lying to a patient of the psych hospital. “I have time,” I said.

  Lola reached out for the pinky of my right hand. She tugged me along just enough to get me going, then let go. We took the long way around the dual diagnosis dorm and made our way to the campus proper. March was halfway between coming in like a lion and going out like a lamb. In fact, we were right in the middle of the month, March 15th, the ides of March. Why was the word “ides” plural when it only referred to one day? Why wasn’t it the ide of March? Why couldn’t you have just one ide? I let it go. Lola and I strolled across the grass carpeting the south quad, among the knotty oak trees and the old brick buildings and the squat shrubs and the cracked sidewalks that represented the legacy of RW Winfield.

  “This takes me back,” Lola said.

  At first, I thought she meant that walking in the afternoon took her back to the days of our high school sweetheartship when we squeezed in as much life as was possible between the end of school and the return of her father in the evening. Walking with Lola, feeling her tug on my pinkie, had given me a jolt of that feeling.

  Lola rode the current of a different memory. She pointed to the basketball courts on the south end of the south quad. “I played on a co-ed basketball team. An intramural league, you know? It was me and a bunch of dorks from Art School. We lost every game we played. It wasn’t totally our fault because those outdoor courts over there were the only place you could practice. And there were always guys playing, all the time. Come out at midnight, two in the morning, guys would be playing basketball. And the way they played, you called out if you wanted to play in the next game. The winner got to stay on the court. So we’d all come out here, ready to practice, then we’d get in a game, play for, like, five minutes, lose to the team that beat everybody, and have to wait an hour for a new game to open up. It wasn’t fair.”

  “Doesn’t sound like it.”

  “And to make matters worse, this one guy on our team, a painter who wasn’t nearly as good as he thought he was—at anything: painting, basketball, anything—broke the index finger on his painting hand. After that, we were all too scared that we’d hurt our hands. Our awful team got worse.” She shook her head, glanced up at me. Her ironed caramel hair swooped over her left eye. “It was fun, though. College was fun.” The toe of Lola’s wooden sandal clicked on a rock in the grass. She knelt down and picked it up. She rolled the rock between her fingers, getting the feel of the ridges, then threw it in the direction of the basketball court. The rock flew for about twenty feet and fell into the grass. “Who would’ve known then?”

  “Known what?”

  “All of it. That Winfield would close down. That the state would turn this campus into a mental hospital. That I’d be a patient here.” She hung her head. I watched her feet as she walked, one foot in front of the other, sandals and toes getting lost in the tall grass, the sunflowers resting for a second, then rising to plant themselves again in front of her. With her head still hung, Lola said softly, “How could I tell little eighteen-year-old Lola that we’d be back here in another eighteen years? It would break both our hearts.”

  I didn’t know how to answer. I wanted to ask why she was at the hospital, what had happened. I knew better than that. Back when I still ran the community space in Fresno, we’d get a fair number of ex-cons coming in to learn how to make a resumé and how to interview for a job and get the job despite their background. At first, I’d ask the ex-cons what their crimes had been. I quickly learned not to, not because the ex-cons wouldn’t tell me. Ex-cons are usually qui
ck to tell their side of the story. I learned not to ask them because it was nosy. They’d already served their time. They’d done whatever they’d done and accepted their punishment and did what we, as a society, asked them to do. That was enough, so I learned to leave that question unasked and do what I could to help them take the next step. Lola wasn’t an ex-con and of course there was a world of difference between a prison and a psych hospital. The core principle still applied, though: she was trying to right whatever went wrong and that was all I needed to know.

  The unasked question hung like a cloud. Silence rained down. My body felt heavy, as if I’d gone swimming in jeans and now had to walk around in wet clothes weighing me down. I didn’t know what to do. Lola stopped walking. She turned to face me, but stared at our feet below us. I hugged her. She kept her arms by her side for a second, her face pressed against my chest, her breaths warming the fabric of my jacket and shirt, right down to the skin. That second passed. I loosened my hug, ready to let go. Lola wrapped her arms around me and squeezed. Time stuttered. Lola let go.

  “Let’s go to the north quad,” she said. “Dr. Benengeli is having rehearsal.” Lola started walking. I followed.

  “What’s she rehearsing?”

  “She puts on plays as a form of therapy. I guess it’s the same principle as Paxil, you know? You get people out of their heads and thoughts for a while, and when they come back from either the drug or the play, they have a little perspective. I did some little one-act stuff with her, but I didn’t want to do a whole play. Hopefully, I’ll be out of here before opening day.”

  Lola led me across the south quad, past the gymnasium and the lecture hall where I’d gone to that first all-staff meeting, across the street, around the main hospital building, and through the courtyard where a small owl sat perched on the red roof tile, shaded by an overhang and watching squirrels dart carelessly around the white fir tree. I used one of my many keys to open the door of the psych tech school. We cut through the lobby. I waved to the secretary there. She smiled and waved back. We exited through the back yard and into the overgrown north quad, past most of the main action of the hospital. Up ahead, about twenty yards away, Dr. Benengeli and a group of patients stood in front of a bandshell on the open-air stage. Lola pointed to a bench nearby, in the shade of a gray pine. The ground around the bench was matted with pine needles. We took a seat.