I assumed he was a new employee. The aloha shirt on Hawaiian Shirt Friday cemented the assumption in my mind. I finished my call and offered the visitor a seat in the state-issued, metal-and-vinyl chair in front of my desk. He sat down. I said, “Sorry about that. I’d been on hold for almost forty-five minutes before I got through. I couldn’t just hang up.”
“It’s no problem,” the guy said. He handed me a business card that announced him as a member of the Los Angeles County Police Department. A homicide detective.
I took a second to readjust my story about this man in front of me, deleting the new employee notion, casting him as the detective I’d been awaiting, and dismissing the notion of detectives I’d developed during multiple viewings of Elliott Gould in The Long Goodbye. I said, “I hate it when people do that to me. When I come to their office and they just stick a finger in the air and keep talking on the phone. I hated doing it myself.”
The detective shrugged. “I could’ve called ahead and told you I was coming.”
“Still. I apologize.”
The detective waved off the apology, asked me if I knew Frank Walters and his nephew, Connor Jarred, if I knew about the fire, if I knew why he was there. I did. I’d been half-expecting at least a call from the police since I’d first heard from Brandon. I ran through all the possible conversations in my head so many times I started to worry that any answers I gave the police might sound rehearsed. I also reached a point in my thoughts about all of this where I realized that it was highly doubtful any police officers in the country would accept Ape Man’s alibi: that it wasn’t really him who did it, that it was me inside his head, taking control. My understanding of the police—which may have been real or may have been entirely based on crime novels I’d read and bad cop dramas on television—was that police generally arrest the easiest likely suspect and gather only the evidence to convict him. They had Ape Man in custody. High-priced lawyer or not, no metaphysical defense was likely to get him off this hook. At least this is the way it was likely to play out in a novel or on television. Who knew about the world outside of fiction? Anyway, for my purposes, it hardly mattered what I said to this detective.
I was concerned about the interview with him, but I wasn’t exactly worried. RW Winfield’s cottage had been torn down for less than four hours before I went looking for another way into Mindland. I’d discovered that any dark place where it would be safe to leave my body while my mind wandered would work just as well as the footlocker. So if I messed it all up with the detective, I could simply creep into his mind at night and convince him that I was innocent. I tried not to think about that last point. I said, “Brandon Burch told me that you guys might be coming around.”
“You know Mr. Burch?”
“We used to play in a band together. Pop Culture and the References.” I wished I had a copy of one of the records we released or one of the fanzines that ran an interview with us to hand to him. It seemed like the kind of thing that would happen if this were a television show. The camera would focus on a picture of Brandon and me both looking as if we were in our mid-thirties but dressed to denote an earlier time and the folly of following the fashions of another decade. I wanted to stay within the formula. I just couldn’t.
The detective said, “Never heard of you guys.”
“That’s why I’m here at Oak View and Brandon’s working in advertising.”
The detective smiled. “So do you know what Mr. Jarred says about you?”
I shook my head.
“He says that you crept into his head and convinced him to kill Mr. Walters.”
“Oh, really?” I laughed a little while I said it. It was a nervous laugh but I also thought it was funny in that it was ridiculous enough to fit into what Lola called “my odd little world.”
The detective looked embarrassed. “I’m just repeating what he said.”
“I understand.” I swept up the papers dealing with the land grant, stacked them neatly into a file folder, and slid the file folder to the left side of my desk. “You know, we have some empty beds here. Mr. Jarred’s welcome to come stay for a while.”
“Don’t be surprised if the state takes you up on that,” the detective said, though we both knew that convicts with mental illnesses didn’t end up at sunny, restful Oak View. They usually ended up in prison, like any other convict. “But I do have to ask you some questions.”
I nodded.
The detective pulled out a notebook and read the first question. “What do you know about the collective unconscious?”
“It all comes from Karl Jung, right? Archetypes and that kind of thing. It’s how he explained why fairy tales are so similar from one culture to another, isn’t it?”
The detective shrugged.
I said, “You’d really be better off asking one of the psychologists about it.”
“What about Dr. Bishop and the collective unconscious?”
“Well, now, that’s different. What Dr. Bishop studied wasn’t really the collective unconscious. It was more like telepathy or ESP. Like, she did this experiment where she set up a camera in my foyer to see if my dog could sense me coming home.”
“And could he?”
“That’s the funny thing. He usually could. But I usually came home at the same time every day. Plus, I commute by bus, so he could’ve just gotten excited every time the #6 rolled down Main Street.” I paused for a second. The detective sat in the chair like the guy who’d pulled the shortest straw. I added, “Connor Jarred killed my dog. I think. Maybe he just kidnapped him. I can’t figure out what happened to the pup, anyway.”
“Really?”
I nodded. “He and Walters had this crazy idea that they could use telepathy in advertising. Put the thoughts right into your head that you wanted to buy this or that product. It seemed silly to me. I kinda just laughed them off until they took my dog. After that, I did my best to avoid them.” I wondered if I’d said too much, given myself a motive, at least, or raised a little suspicion in the detective. I wanted to ask him about Clint Dempsey, if a dog’s body had turned up in the wreckage of the house, if the detective knew anything. But I told myself to be calm. If Clint Dempsey were alive, I could find him.
The detective didn’t look the least bit suspicious. I think the word “telepathy” was helping me, too. Even though what Dr. Bishop was working on wasn’t really telepathy, using that word seemed to be a good way to discredit everything she’d done, at least in the minds of laymen. The word seemed to be working.
“I see,” the detective said. He looked at his notebook, flipped a page, scanned the words there, and let out a heavy sigh. His thoughts were painted on his face.
“I’m not the only one who thinks all this is silly, am I?” I asked.
“You and me both, I think.”
I stood from the chair. “As long as you’re here, let me give you a tour of the facility. It’s a pretty neat place.”
The detective checked his watch and said, “Sure.”
I led the detective through the maze of the Williams Building and out into the warm spring day. A soft breeze blew in from the west and carried with it the faint aroma of the Pacific. I walked the detective all around the hospital grounds, showing him the research facilities and the cafeteria and the gym and the different units and the outdoor stage and the buildings that hadn’t been renovated yet. We chatted the whole time. He asked me about the Winfield scandal. When he saw that I didn’t really know much about it, he told me a few anecdotes that one of his colleagues had told him. This led to me showing him Lola’s paintings in the abandoned McCabe Hall. Eventually, we stumbled over Dr. Bishop’s old research room and went inside. Of course, most of the stuff had been cleared out: no more computers, desks, cages rigged up to shock the squirrels. No more squirrels. All that remained was Dr. Bishop’s old motorcycle helmet. I picked it up and told the detective the story of her experiment.
“And she got paid to do this?” the detective asked.
“No,”
I said. “She did it in her spare time.” I spun the helmet around in my hands. One of Dr. Bishop’s gray hairs clung to the inside pads of the helmet. I thought to pull the hair out, then decided to leave it. Her final artifact.
“The craziest thing about Walters and all of this,” I said, “is that advertising already works really, really well. Think of all the stuff that you believe just because you haven’t questioned the ads you’ve seen. Think about something like a diamond, right? It’s a rock. That’s it. A pretty rock, but still, a rock. And look how much people will pay for one. And a tiny little one, at that. The diamonds you buy aren’t even big enough to be good for what rocks are generally good for. But look at all the harm the diamond industry does to the world. It’s madness. And if you have an industry that can convince you to blow thousands of dollars on a shiny rock that has no practical utility, even if you know apartheid dug that rock out of the ground for you, how much more effective does that industry need to be?”
The detective nodded. “I hadn’t really thought about that.”
“And you’re a detective. Your whole job is to detect suspicious activity. If you’re not questioning this stuff, then you know it’s all flying over the head of the average Joe.”
The detective’s head kept bobbing on his shoulders as if he were agreeing with one thought after another in his head. He didn’t say anything, though.
After we’d spent about an hour touring the grounds, the detective finally asked me where I’d been the night when Ape Man burned the house down. I told him I’d show him and headed for the arboretum. The springtime sun cast hazy shadows among the gathering of indigenous trees. A bluebird landed on a nearby black elder and picked at the petals of a small white flower that may have had dreams of becoming a berry someday. I pointed out the bench where Dr. Bishop had first promised to lead me into Mindland and told the detective that I’d been sitting there with Eric, talking about Eric’s mom dying, drinking beer. I told the detective that Eric could corroborate my story, but the detective had to be patient. Eric worked on his own schedule. Sometimes, it took days or weeks for him to respond. “But if I committed the murder telepathically, I guess it doesn’t matter where I did it from, huh?” I added.
The detective laughed and said, “It’s so ridiculous. I almost feel crazy coming up here.”
I stopped walking and said, “That’s the scary thing about working in a psych hospital. Everyone starts to seem crazy after a while.”
38
After Dr. Bishop’s funeral, Lola seemed okay with coming by the psych hospital. We often had lunch together at a picnic bench among the squirrels or revisited her paintings in McCabe Hall or hung out with Eric. Within a few months, everything settled down. The detective stayed in Agoura Hills. Ape Man copped an insanity plea and got himself a cell in at the California Men’s Colony. I stayed in the clear.
Brandon kept calling, trying to take me out to lunch at chain restaurants or tempt me with the cast-off fringe benefits of his business—everything from the expensive wardrobe pieces left over from a commercial shoot to the winning raffle ticket that could claim a brand new Toyota Prius. Rejecting Brandon was different from rejecting Walters. I was no more inclined to give Brandon information than I had been for Walters, but I still wanted to keep an earlier version of Brandon alive in my mind, a Brandon who toured the continent with me, screaming silly punk rock songs and answering to the name Fester. As long as that little Brandon lived in my memory, I couldn’t hate the mid-level advertising executive he’d become. So I let him keep trying to get the information, all the while knowing that I could probably convince him that this Mindland stuff was all absurd. Or if he couldn’t be convinced, I could just torment him nightly in Mindland until my voice in his head earned him a room at Oak View. One way or another, I’d deal with him.
My work required me to be on duty forty hours a week, but the actual work I did took far less than forty hours. I found a bit of autonomy during the in-between times. I wandered around the hospital grounds, chatting with people, looking for interesting nooks and crannies. I read and researched different things I was curious about. I spent a lot of time in the archives, wading through Dr. Bishop’s papers—the ones that Eric hadn’t burned—that dealt with her life and her research prior to the Mindland studies. I spent a lot more time thinking about going back into Mindland, thinking about all the things I could do there. Little things: helping Lola forget about her childhood pain, helping Eric deal with the death of his mother, helping the Ape Man through his incarceration. Big things: convincing a president to stop a stupid war, getting Congress to spend more money on education and health care, maybe even convincing insurance companies that mental illnesses were real illnesses and needed to be covered. I daydreamed about sliding back into that big, open field with all of the teachers of antiquity and taking my own stump, teaching my own rules, laying down my own philosophy. I spent hours at my desk on the third and a half floor of the Williams Building, winding up my little toy bird, watching it do back flips, and dreaming about saving the world. When temptation grew too strong, when Mindland seemed too close, too inviting, when my dreams took me to the point where I wanted to act on them, I usually left the office and found other people to talk to. Often, I’d wander over to Dr. Benengeli’s rehearsals. Her newest play was Waiting for Godot.
A few days before opening night, Lola came to the psych hospital to join me for lunch. She brought two bottles of iced tea and homemade fish and chips wrapped in brown butcher paper. We sat on the old bench where we’d watched the rehearsals of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Summer breezes fluttered through the branches of the gray pine. In front of us, a shadow cut the stage in half. Most of the actors lingered in the shade around the perimeter. The sunlight pinged off the wiry white hair of one of the actors. It tickled his bow tie and muted the maroon fibers of his sweater vest. Lola pointed at the actor and said, “Is that The Professor?”
I’d seen a few rehearsals up close. I knew the answer. “Yes, it is.”
“Really? As detached from reality as that guy is, Dr. Benengeli gave him a part?”
“A big part. He’s Estragon.”
“Isn’t that one of the leads?”
“Yes.”
“Pretty risky casting move.”
“You know Dr. Benengeli,” I said. “She likes to play fast and loose.” As if on cue, Dr. Benengeli scooted a wooden orange crate to center stage. She pulled The Professor close. She stepped on the box, placed her left hand on her breast, and spread her exceptionally small right arm in front of her in a mimicry of declamation. She climbed off the crate. The Professor climbed onto the crate and mimicked her mimicry. Even from a distance, he looked unstable. Dr. Benengeli kept a steadying hand on The Professor’s elbow. I took a sip of my tea and added, “Plus, there’s an Estragon understudy.”
Lola sprinkled malt vinegar onto her fish, took a bite, watched a bit more of the rehearsal, and chewed. When she was done, she said, “So who’s the other main character? What’s his name?”
“Vladimir.”
“Who’s playing him?”
“Walk over there. You’re not going to believe it.”
“A movie star?”
I nodded, as if I’d heard of the movie star or even remembered his name. When one of the secretaries told me about him, she listed a half-dozen movies that I’d not only missed seeing but hadn’t even heard of. Matters were made worse when I’d met the movie star at a previous rehearsal. The Professor introduced us, then wandered off. The movie star and I were left alone in front of the stage. After a few awkward seconds, I said the only thing that came to my mind, which was, “So, you’re an actor?” He laughed as if I were being coy. I smiled, left it at that, and drifted away. I hadn’t told Lola about that encounter because I feared she would rent a handful of movies that I didn’t particularly want to see just so I’d know who this actor was.
Lola set her fish and chips and butcher paper and bottle of malt vinegar on the bench and
started toward the stage. I watched the brazen sway of her hips as she walked away. She took maybe fifteen steps, then stopped suddenly. Her hand covered her mouth. She twisted around and rushed back to me.
“Is that who I think it is?”
I nodded.
“Wow! We have to go to opening night.”
“Well, you know I’m in the play, too?”
“Really?” Lola raised an eyebrow and latched her gaze onto mine. “And who are you playing? Pozzo?”
“Nope,” I said. “I got the title role.”
“Godot?”
I smiled.
Lola slapped me on the thigh gently but still with enough force to make the keys on my belt loop jingle. She grinned like I was kidding.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Patricia Geary, Jack Lopez, Justin Bryant, Mickey Hess, and Todd Taylor for reading the manuscript and giving me helpful feedback. Thanks to all the former employees of the Camarillo State Mental Hospital and the current employees of another psychiatric hospital who let me interview them for this book. Thanks also to my publisher, Jennifer Joseph, for making my manuscript a book. Special thanks to the City of Ventura for awarding me an artist’s grant that facilitated the writing of this novel. Biggest thanks of all to my wife, Felizon Vidad, for working in a couple of psych hospitals so that I’d have an idea for a new novel, for her careful reading and fact-checking, and for everything else.
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