Madhouse Fog

by Sean Carswell

  The dog’s name was Nietzsche. He was so old that he dated back to a time in our shared life when my wife and I were too young and stupid to realize how pretentious it was to name your dog after a philosopher, much less a German one with five consecutive consonants in his last name. That would put our adoption of Nietzsche at the summer between our freshman and sophomore years at Fresno State. If you count the years backwards from the time of this story to that particular shared summer, and then apply those years to Nietzsche’s life, you’d realize that he was nearly eighteen years old. He had a permanent scab on his back just north of his tail. His hair matted up as it dried from his bath. He could not see. He could not hear. He was able to digest less than half the food he ate. The rest of the food came out as vomit or diarrhea. Since his hip was pretty much shot and he couldn’t walk too well, he generally lay around within a few feet of this vomit or diarrhea. He smelled like death. It was time.

  The only thing keeping the poor Nietzsche alive was my wife’s love and her patience with the necessity of cleaning up his vomit and diarrhea daily. I had loved Nietzsche, too. I saw him as a portal into greater things in my life when we first adopted him. As his health deteriorated, Nietzsche came to be a reminder of my own mortality and the futility of life. He also came to represent all of my life’s failures.

  I sat in that laundromat and thought about Nietzsche and my failures until the washer cycled through and I transferred my clothes to the dryer. I returned to my white plastic chair between the Santa Anas and stared at the blurred ink on my paperback.

  A young woman came into the laundromat at this point. Her hair had been dyed Jayne Mansfield platinum, her bangs cut high across her forehead. They were dyed black. She wore a little white dress tailored to look like something from a ’40s stag magazine. Her high heels clumped across the laundromat linoleum. A barbed wire tattoo wrapped around her ankle. The Santa Ana winds blew through her sheer dress. Goosebumps formed on her pale legs. She plopped her clothes on the three washers closest to me. My glance drifted back to the blurred ink of the paperback. My mind returned to the chart of the typical American lifespan.

  If you’re tracking this with me, you’ll see a couple in their mid-thirties. They have graduated from a state university. They’re both gainfully employed. They have health insurance, vision benefits, and retirement plans. They’ve shared a dog for nearly eighteen years. This should be a time in their lives when they’ve proven that they can be nurturing, that they’re responsible enough to have a life dependent upon them for food, shelter, etc. They’ve garnered stability. At this point, they should be focused on taking the next step: breeding. Instead, you see the couple living in two towns separated by hundreds of miles. One half of the couple takes the responsibility of killing the dog (humanely; it’s the best thing for the dog after all). The other half sits in a laundromat washing the new clothes he needed for his first job in a mainstream, white-collar environment. Inspect this development chart more closely. You may realize that, by now, the couple should be four or five years beyond this point. There should be a child. Nietzsche’s demise should coincide with the child’s adventures in kindergarten. At the very least, there should be a washing machine and dryer at home and laundromats should be a romanticized memory of the lean, post-college days. You may look at me, the one in the laundromat with discount department store clothes, and cast the blame. This would not be the right time to defend myself. I would be too distracted.

  I snapped out of the chart and my blame when I saw a vague white fluttering in the far right recesses of my peripheral vision. The Santa Anas played with the pin-up girl’s white skirt. It floated up her pale, goose-bumped thighs. She set down her detergent and flattened her skirt. I glanced lower down her leg, watched that barbed wire tattoo twist around her ankle. That barbed wire allowed me to do more math. An unspoken fashion moratorium must have passed on the barbed wire band tattoo sometime around 1995… ’96 at the latest. It reached the apex of its popularity, though, around ’92. The recipient of a barbed wire band tattoo would likely be no younger than eighteen, no older than twenty-three. Looking at median numbers, factoring standard deviations, discarding data too wildly errant to be relevant, I decided that this woman would likely be around my age. Around my age and also at a laundromat, but wearing high heels and a sheer dress that was no match for the January California winds. Her development chart had to be lagging behind mine. I tried to take a little comfort in that and returned my gaze to the paperback.

  It was no use trying to read. Nietzsche was surely dead at this point. My life compared to a pin-up laundromat girl meant little to me. I worried more about my life compared to what I wanted, what I dreamed, where I found meaning under this crushing wave of mortality. At what point would I be broken-hipped, blind, deaf, picking at perpetual scabs, and sleeping next to my own vomit? Will someone have the humanity to put me to sleep? Will I have the courage to accept an end to this life? Did Nietzsche know where he was going this morning? Did he shake and quiver in my wife’s arms? Did she wrap him in a blanket and try to convince herself that Nietzsche was shaking because of the cold, not because of the great unknown he was facing? Did that white dress just flutter up higher?

  I shot my glance over just in time to see the pin-up girl’s hand smoothing her dress down. Surely, the corner of my eye didn’t deceive me. Surely, the Santa Anas had swept that dress high enough for me to realize—despite my fractured consciousness—that the pin-up girl was not wearing underwear. Surely, it was better that I didn’t see it. This woman deserved her privacy. She didn’t need some sad psych hospital grant writer with a dead dog staring at her ass.

  I kept my eyes glued to the paperback that my mind wouldn’t let me read. I told myself that my eyes needed to stay there because this young woman deserved her privacy, that she should be afforded the opportunity to sort her laundry into three machines without my lecherous stares. To be more honest, though, I kept my stares off her because I was convinced that people could feel it when you stare at them. A breeze grazes their necks. Their scalps feel lighter. They know. They look around to see who’s looking. I didn’t want this to happen to her, either for her own comfort or because the wind still blew through the laundromat doors. Either one.

  I set my paperback down on the white plastic table adjacent to me and my white plastic chair. I picked up the paperclip I’d been using as a bookmark. I used it to dig at the dead skin around my cuticles. I thought of Nietzsche. The breeze picked up. My glance shot over. All mysteries were solved. The pin-up girl was not wearing underwear. Her hands were occupied with the sorting of her laundry. She let the wind blow and her dress flutter. She effectively, maybe unconsciously, mooned me. I watched until I felt a bit embarrassed. My mind drifted. My eyes followed the waves of the dress as it floated like a white streamer trapped between the wind and a tree branch. I wanted to look away, but at the core I was still a heterosexual male of the species, prone to all of the instincts inherent to my role in the animal kingdom. The wind died down within a few seconds anyway.

  My mind kept fluttering, wondering if it meant anything that the dog named after the man who declared God dead was now dead himself, wondering if any of this added up to anything. Wondering why I hadn’t just rented a car and driven to Fresno. This last thought killed the breeze in my mind because it seemed every other time in my life, I would have acted that way. I could imagine no point in my life when I would not have accompanied my wife in the task of taking Nietzsche on his final journey to the vet. But this time, for some reason, it was like someone had gotten into my head and insisted I stay here. It was that voice—the one that sounded like Dr. Bishop’s—motivating me to act against the way I typically acted. Thinking about this hurt. It sent my eyes back to the pages of the paperback. I still couldn’t make out the letters.

  Then the wind picked up. It inflated her dress to the point where I could see above her ass. I could see the dimples where her lower back tied into her pelvis. Again, the pin-up girl did
nothing to smooth her skirt or fight the wind. She dropped a handful of quarters into her washer. She selected the proper water temperatures. I wondered if perhaps she could feel my glance, if she knew and she was letting it happen, if she wanted me to look. A wave of anxiety crashed on the shores of my stomach. I swam under it. After all, this wasn’t a situation that required anything of me. I was married. I was happy enough about it. If I had been single, I would’ve felt the pressure to talk to this woman, to invite her to the coffee shop down the road, to buy her a pastry and listen to her life, to maybe get wrapped up in all the drama promised by someone who wore high heels to a laundromat and unabashedly advertised one of the most embarrassing tattoos from the early ’90s. As things stood, I enjoyed a flash of divinity. My dryer buzzed. I pocketed my paperback and went to fold laundry.

  Tall double-washers stood between me and the pin-up girl. She picked up her gossip magazine and pink laundry basket, and sat down in the white plastic chair I’d just vacated. She was no longer visible through the double washers. I folded my laundry. I dwelled again on the thoughts of my wife taking the responsibility that I dodged, on the distance between me and Fresno, on my uncharacteristic inability to be in Fresno at this crucial moment, on the fact that I’d spent a hundred dollars on three pairs of slacks, five button-up shirts, and a brown belt to match my dusty loafers. The next day would be Sunday. I’d go to the psych hospital to feel less lonely and use their computer to search out more funding possibilities, to find something to distract me from the death of Nietzsche.

  3

  The residents of the dual diagnosis dorm were on an afternoon smoke break when I arrived on hospital grounds. There was something lopsided about the whole group. They were like an oft-patched bicycle inner tube held together by bulky squares, stretched thin at the weak points, full of a wary optimism that this dried-out, cracked old rubber could hold it all together if it just had the right tire wrapped around it, if it were only asked to maintain the right amount of pressure and no careless or cruel bastard came along to over-inflate it. I had a smile and nod at the ready for the lot of them.

  One young white guy in a FUBU sweatshirt held my glance so long that I felt like I had to say something. “Hi.”

  He replied, “’Sup,” and kept looking.

  I took this as an invitation to cross the line past what was likely appropriate, considering my probationary status as an employee and my perhaps shaky status as a husband now that my wife was balking on making the few-hundred-mile move to Southern California. I said to him, “Lola’s not taking her smoke break, huh?”

  “Who?”

  “Lola Diaz?”

  “She a nurse or something?”

  “A patient.”

  The dude shook his head. “Ain’t no beaners in this dorm.”

  I winced, either at the word “beaner” or at the usually repressed notion that something about me in my white skin and discount department store clothes suggested that I was an okay guy to say “beaner” around. I thought about making a comment about his comment and taking this conversation to the next level. I stopped myself when I realized that this dude was a patient at a mental hospital. “A patient,” I told myself. “In a mental hospital.” Besides that, he was a white guy in a FUBU shirt. I let it all slide, cut through the dual diagnosis dorm, and headed for the Williams Building.

  Originally, the Williams Building had been built on the bottom of a hill. Small white Doric columns framed the entranceway. The building stretched three stories above the classical entranceway, its ancient brick bleached by the California sun, reinforced by rusty sand filling in porous gaps, and worn smooth by Pacific winds. The original building carried an addition the way a horseshoe crab carries its young. The addition stretched halfway up the hill, supported by newer brick, flanked by newer windows, topped by a black shingle roof that was sloped slightly steeper than the original. Sunlight bounced off the ghost of a long-forgotten contractor who surely must have put an arm around a cost-conscious university president saying, “We can save you thousands of dollars this way and who’s gonna know the difference? You and me. That’s it.” And perhaps a younger ghost of that older university president was looking at the finished addition, thinking, No. Everyone will notice. All in all, the building didn’t look too bad. Another twenty years of sun and dirt and wind might even the score.

  The toughest thing about the addition came from the building’s inside layout. The Williams Building was four stories high but it had eight different levels. Nine, if you counted the basement. The first floor of the original building was roughly six feet lower than the first floor of the newer building. All of the ceilings were about twelve feet high. The hallways from the newer building didn’t exactly match up with the older hallways. Shrinking faculty offices, wide open halls for lectures, subdivided rooms for graduate assistants, and reroutes through the old classrooms that had been cut into newer, smaller ones added to the overall maze of the guts of the Williams Building. Six-foot stairways would surprise me. Halls would lead to dark recesses yet to be remodeled for the building’s new job in the psych hospital. Simple errands during my first week caused me to pause and reflect on who might own a complete blueprint of this building and whether he’d sell me that blueprint. At times, I dreamed of drawing the Williams Building treasure map and placing a giant red X on my office. I toyed with the idea of bringing string to work, letting it unravel from the front door to my office. Breadcrumbs seemed too unreliable. My office was on the third and a half floor.

  I wound my way through the Williams labyrinth, counting my steps. Twelve paces to the right to reach the stairway, up four levels of stairs, then to the left. I fumed about that cracked inner tube of a kid calling the second girl I’d ever loved a “beaner.” I cut through the interns’ lounge and counted seven more steps to the left. I tried to remind myself that I have to give people more leeway in a psych hospital. That argument didn’t work. I still fumed. I successfully reminded myself that those last seven steps to the left were always a mistake and turned around, repairing those seven mistaken steps and adding an additional thirteen to them before reaching another half-stairway that led me to the familiar right turn into what on Sundays was apparently a dark hallway. For whatever reason, this reminded me of Nietzsche again. The dog, not the philosopher. I closed my eyes and counted my last steps thinking about the now-departed pup. At the count of eight, I opened my eyes again, turned to the right, and opened my office door.

  The Professor sat there. He faced my desk, back to the door. He did not turn to look at me as I entered the office. I walked around my desk, sat in my chair, and faced him. “Professor,” I said, and smiled.

  This is a problem of mine: I smile when I don’t know which emotion to express. I’ve been doing it at least since I was a little kid. I distinctly remember smiling when my mother told me that my grandmother—her mother—had died. Not because I wasn’t sad. I was very sad; I’d just lost my favorite grandparent. I was old enough at the time to know what death meant. I just wasn’t old enough to know what to do with that sadness and my mom usually cheered up if I gave her a smile. So I gave her an absolutely inappropriate smile.

  Thirty years of life hadn’t taught me much about what to do with my sadness. The best I could come up with on this Sunday was a trip to a psych hospital and a smile for The Professor, who, to the best of my knowledge, was a patient with the potential to become dangerous.

  The Professor stood and offered his hand. I stood and shook it. We both sat again. The Professor didn’t say a word. He regarded me. I took in his bow tie, his blue blazer, his maroon sweater vest, his crisp white shirt. Crumbs clung to the fuzz of his sweater vest, gathered along the little crest formed by his stomach when he sat. My eyes lingered on the crumbs. Toast? A Reuben for lunch, perhaps?

  Time passed. That stupid smile stayed glued to my face.

  Finally, The Professor said, “You must be the new grant writer.”

  “I must be,” I said.

 
“Your timing couldn’t be better,” he said.

  I waited for him to go on, but he didn’t. He seemed somehow smaller in that chair, facing my desk. In front of the lecture hall on that first day, The Professor had beamed with a well-honed stage presence. Or classroom presence. He’d had that style, that cool of a shy person in his element. Sitting in the chair across from me, he lost that style. His body language seemed to tell a familiar story about being on the wrong side of a desk in all the places we find ourselves in the smaller chair: when we’re sent to the principal’s office, when we buy insurance, when we file a report at the police station, when we petition a professor for a higher grade or a boss for a raise. A transference from all those small moments of supplication weighed down The Professor’s shoulders.

  I didn’t like my position—that of a principal, an insurance salesman, a cop, an authority of any kind. I wanted to put him at ease but I didn’t know how. I watched him and kept waiting. When the pause stretched into the recesses of uncomfortable, I said, “How can I help?”

  The Professor stroked the edge of his bow tie. “I’m sure I don’t need to tell you about the scandal.”

  I shrugged. I hoped it was a vague enough gesture to get the three-syllable-crazy story from him. Apparently, The Professor read my shrug differently.

  “Needless to say, Winfield University has seen better days. What this university needs is something dazzling, an academic statement that will reestablish us among the elite private universities on the West Coast. I propose to make this statement.”