Madhouse Fog

by Sean Carswell

  I picked up a pencil from the cup on my desk. I rolled the pencil between the pads of my thumbs and forefingers on both hands. The Professor watched the pencil’s slow roll. His eyes met mine, looking for an answer. I said, “Please, go on?”

  Perhaps it was a little cruel for me to humor The Professor in this way. Perhaps I should’ve led him back through the maze of the Williams building and into a psych tech’s arms. I couldn’t help myself. My life’s problems had gotten to the point where denial wasn’t working any more. I either needed to face them head on or find a distraction. The Professor seemed to be the perfect distraction.

  “Now, I know you’re familiar with the works of David Hume. I recognized this when you visited my Monday lecture a few weeks back. I’m sure you’re aware of the fundamental ontological problems raised by Hume and other modern philosophers, going all the way back to Descartes.”

  I was not, in fact, familiar with any of that. I’d never heard of David Hume. I didn’t know what the word “ontological” meant. I ran over the word in my mind, just to travel its ridges and humps. I said, “Sure. Sure. Go on.” Was that dopey smile still on my face? I’m sure it was.

  “Well, I propose to solve that problem.” The Professor said this so definitively that, for a split second, I felt a little foolish for not coming up with this conclusion myself.

  I responded the only way I could think to. “Great!”

  The Professor stood and took two steps to my bookshelves. I’d taken my books with me when I moved down from Fresno. The shelves were full of a hodgepodge of books on Buddhism and Taoism, grant-writing manuals, political books that I’d likely never read, newer versions of mid-20th century crime paperbacks, contemporary Japanese fiction, a few classics whose spines knew no wear, one crazy novel about carpenters in Florida, and, let’s face it, a lot of junk. The Professor took his time examining the spines. He pulled out Thomas Merton’s translations of Chuang-tzu. “Have you heard the butterfly story?” he asked.

  “Yep,” I said. “The guy couldn’t be sure if he was a man dreaming he was a butterfly or vice versa.”

  “The transformation of things,” The Professor said. He clasped hands behind his back and started pacing. My office was only about ten feet wide. His paces were short. His classroom presence had returned. His transformation was complete.

  “In essence, this question is endless. It doesn’t matter if it’s Chuangtzu wondering if he’s butterfly or man, or if it’s Descartes staring at his hands, wondering if they really are his hands. The result is the same. We learn that everything we believe to be real isn’t necessarily real. We pause for a second and wonder: if the past is gone, if the future has not yet happened, how can we be sure that our entire existence isn’t simply this moment right now? How do we know that we didn’t make up our past to explain our present? How do we know the future will resemble anything of the past?”

  The Professor paused to look for my reaction. Who knows what my external expression was or what he read on my face? Internally, I liked the argument. I liked the idea that the whole universe could be wrapped up in this moment and my past could be a fiction. If it were all fictitious, if there were no past or future, I’d be off the hook. I could let it all float away and just enjoy this one moment: my own private philosophy lecture.

  The Professor carried on. “Take you, for instance. You sit at that desk. You imagine yourself to be a grant writer employed by a private university. You have a vague sense that you went to a university yourself. You imagine memories of that university experience. Perhaps you have an idea of classes you took. Perhaps, when you dig through the crevices of your mind, you can unearth little treasures of knowledge from those classes. Perhaps you don’t even dig through these parts of your brain. Perhaps it’s something else, something personal. Your mind lingers on some problems with your love life, or with a sick child, or with unresolved feelings about your parents. Who knows? Maybe your dog just died. Anyway, you know you have this feeling of loss or longing. It’s vague. You don’t really understand where it comes from, so you assign it to a lover or child or parent or pet. But are they real? Are they here? Can you show me this loved one? Can you be certain that it’s not all a fiction you created in your mind? Maybe this isn’t a university at all. Maybe it’s a mental hospital. Maybe you’re an inmate…”

  “Patient,” I said.

  The Professor stopped pacing. “Excuse me?”

  “Residents of psych hospitals are called ‘patients,’ not ‘inmates.’”

  The Professor nodded and resumed pacing. “If your dream calls them ‘patients,’ we can go with that. Nonetheless, by any objective criteria, you cannot prove to yourself or me right now that any of it exists. The whole universe may have been created for this split second. There may be no past and no future. This may be everything.”

  I nodded and smiled. If only that were the case.

  “What’s the smile about?” The Professor asked.

  “That idea,” I said, “of the past being an illusion and the future a false hope. It’s funny.”

  “It’s not funny,” he said. “Not if you can’t prove otherwise.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I trust that I witnessed my past, and the future will come along, more or less in the way I expect it to. Whether I want it to or not.”

  “And what’s the basis for this trust?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “How do you know that this moment isn’t everything?”

  “I don’t know.” But I did take a second to think about it. Okay, I figured, maybe there would be a bit of a respite if this moment were everything. Maybe it would be nice to relegate my past to a fiction and not deal with it. But I’d want the future part. Sad and lonely as I was feeling at this moment, I still had hope that things would get better. So I answered The Professor honestly. “It would suck if this moment were everything.”

  “It would more than suck. It would drive you mad. It would be unbearable.”

  I actually saw where he was going with this. “It would be so bad,” I said, “that I’d probably create a fictional past and a belief in the future, just to keep from going mad.”

  “And so there’s no distinction.” The Professor pointed a finger to the sky, I guess to illustrate his point. “You can never know if there is any reality to reality, or if it’s all a fiction created to ward off madness.”

  I leaned back in my chair. My pencil commenced its rolling between the pads of my fingertips. “This is the problem that you seek to solve?”

  “Exactly.”

  It was too much for me. Curiosity had completely taken over my better judgment. And besides, this discussion was proving to be exactly the distraction I was seeking. I asked, “How are you going to solve this problem?”

  “A series of objective experiments to show that the world does not necessarily operate the way you imagine. Of course, I’d need funding. Which is where you come in. I have proposals, hypotheses, prospectuses, you name it. It’s all outlined and available for your perusal.” His pacing led him to the window behind me. He opened it. A gust of January filled the room. I spun my seat to watch him.

  “I’d like to see it,” I said. I wondered for a second if these documents really existed, or if they were the elaborate pantomimes carried over from the front of the lecture hall.

  The Professor snapped his fingers. I watched. He climbed out the window and floated away.

  An hour later, the bare wood above the point of my pencil had turned black from pencil lead and the oil of my fingers. I continued to roll it between the pads of my fingers. I still sat in my chair, gazing out the closed window behind my desk. Of course, The Professor hadn’t really floated out of it. He couldn’t have. It’s not humanly possible. He walked out the front door of my office and counted his footsteps to the exit of the Williams Building. There was no other way to explain it.

  Still, our conversation had my head reeling. How did I know anything? More particularly, The Prof
essor seemed so genuine in his beliefs, so convinced these grounds were still part of a university and I was a university grant writer that I didn’t know what to think. Which one of us was the crazy one? Could it be that I was the patient? That there was no wife in Fresno, no Lola Diaz, no dead Nietzsche? I thought about the woman in the laundromat. Surely that had to be part of my overactive imagination, no? Surely American women at the beginning of the 21st century are more careful about exposing their backsides. Or…

  Hmmm. I set the pencil down and turned to my computer. After several minutes of searching through the tangled lines of the internet, I found a story about Descartes. The story had been written by a professor and posted on his university web page. According to this professor, Descartes admitted that there were moments in his life when he spent so much time wrestling with these questions about existence and reality that he could actually make himself believe that his hands weren’t really his own. According to this professor’s web page, when Descartes had these crises of faith, he generally left his lonely office. Being around people seemed to hold these deeper questions at bay.

  At this point in my day, I was leery of the stories professors tell and sick of these questions. I decided to find some people to be around. And preferably not psych patients. I stood and forced opened my window. It creaked. Dust and flecks of old paint fell.

  Outside, a woman with gray hair and a dark business suit approached the Williams Building from the direction of the dual diagnosis dorm. I watched her approach. She waved to me. I waved back. She kept waving. I realized that she was signaling to me. I closed the window. It dropped smoothly. I counted my steps, winding my way down through the labyrinth.

  The woman sat in a plush, dark leather chair in the front lobby of the building. “I’ve been meaning to meet you for a week,” she said.

  “Oh?”

  “Yes, indeed,” she said. “I’m Dr. Bishop.”

  I gave her a broad smile and offered my hand. “It’s a pleasure.”

  She grasped my hand. Her fingers were slim and cool as fresh asparagus.

  “Did it seem sincere?” I asked.

  “What’s that?”

  My smile hadn’t waned. “My greeting. Do I seem sincerely pleased to meet you?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Good. I figure sincerity is everything. If I can fake that, I’ve got it made.”

  She gave me a flustered look as if to say, “You are the grant writer, right? Not a patient?” But, no, I realized. Dr. Bishop was a professional. A psychologist. All of her facial expressions must be carefully calculated.

  I explained myself. “The signature on your email. It’s that quote from George Burns. ‘Sincerity is everything…’”

  Dr. Bishop smiled again. “Oh! I get it. A joke. I’m sorry. My secretary—ex-secretary—put that on my email. It was funny to her. A geeky psychologist joke. I can’t figure out how to get rid of it.” She pointed out the two plush chairs with her cool, slim fingers. “Please have a seat.”

  I did. We discussed hospital business for the next half-hour: forms, departments, hierarchies, donors, social events that were encouraged, social events that could be ignored, insurance plans, retirement benefits, staff projects, research projects, administrators’ jurisdictions, the secretaries who really ran the joint, the charge nurses whose good sides I’d do myself a favor to get on, places to get office supplies, where to pick up the paycheck that had been waiting for me in payroll for 48 hours, Hawaiian shirt Fridays (the first of each month), vacation days and the best time to take them, and everything else that Dr. Bishop could think about. At the end of it all, she said to me, “You know, I’m not an administrator. I just volunteered to lead the search committee for a grant writer.”

  I did know that and told her so.

  She continued, “Which is one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you. I’ve been engaged in some recent fascinating research myself.”

  I wasn’t sure I was ready to hear about it, what with my earlier encounter with The Professor and all. Besides that, I knew a bit about her and her research. I’d suspected as much when I was going through the hiring process, but now, sitting face-to-face with Dr. Bishop, I realized that I did know her. I’d experienced her research firsthand. It had been years ago but it wasn’t an event I was likely to forget. If she remembered me, she didn’t let on. Without dredging up the past, I prodded her into the present. “Oh, yeah?”

  She paused. “Let’s not get into that now.” She patted my knee. “Do you like dogs?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Would you like a puppy?”

  I laughed, surprised. “As a matter of fact, I would.”

  Dr. Bishop clapped twice. Each clap was as sharp and definitive as a period at the end of a sentence. White space separated them. She said, “You look like a dog lover. And we just admitted a patient. A suicide attempt. When the paramedics picked him up, they found the saddest little dog in his apartment. Just a puppy. And, well, long story short, the patient is no longer with us. No longer among the living. But the puppy is living with me. My cats do not like him. He needs a new home. You’re the guy to give it to him.” Dr. Bishop popped out of her seat. She said, “Follow me.”

  I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

  4

  The next day, I sat in my wooden office chair, gazing at the fog outside my office window. I had a three-ring binder on my lap. It was full of papers I had printed off the internet, punched three holes in, and stuck in the binder. I had ordered the pages logically, highlighted them appropriately, made notes in the margins. On the computer behind me, I had computer files that held the drafts of various proposals. The phone on my desk could show a list of my last ten outgoing calls; all to people whose names were in my three-ring binder. Surrounded thus by all the signifiers of the consummate professional, I watched a bluebird.

  The bluebird perched on the high branch of a fir sapling on the hill across from me. The young branch sagged under the bluebird’s weight, swaying in the gentle breeze. I wondered if bluebirds were indigenous to this part of California and if it was odd to see a bluebird in January. Or, perhaps, was this the south where the bluebirds flew in the winter? Are bluebirds migratory? If so, where was the rest of its flock?

  Letting go even further, I indulged in more thoughts, wondering if a group of bluebirds was called a flock, or, perhaps like crows, a group of them could be called a murder. A murder of bluebirds? It didn’t have the right ring to it. And while I was on the subject—or nowhere near it, if you don’t follow my random loose associations—where were all the palm trees on the grounds of this Southern California psych hospital? Wasn’t it state law that palm trees had to be visible in every glance here in Southern California?

  Dr. Benengeli snapped me out of my ruminations. I heard her voice in the hallway outside my office. “Are you supposed to be here?” she asked.

  A male voice responded. He did not answer her question. He just said her name in that warm and jovial way that sets off alarm bells. He said, “Dr. Benengeli.”

  “Walters,” Dr. Benengeli said. She paused. I set my feet on the floor and perked up my ears. “Are you supposed to be here?”

  “I just wanted to say hello.”

  “To whom? To me?”

  “Well, who else?”

  “You know where my office is. You know it’s not in this building.” Dr. Benengeli had a lilt to her voice that I’d never heard. I thought of her exceptionally short stature and the lack of psych techs in this building and of the castor oil coating the barbs of this strange man’s voice. I rushed into the hallway. The fluorescent light above my office door flickered. Dr. Benengeli and the strange man both stopped talking and turned to face me.

  “Do you need a hand, Doctor?” I asked.

  Castor Oil Walters gave me a smile. “You must be the new grant writer,” he said.

  I looked to Dr. Benengeli. Her eyes were like polished stone. I couldn’t read anything in them. She didn’t w
ait for subtleties to play out. “Okay,” she said. “I see how it is. Come on, Walters. It’s easy to get lost in this building. Let me show you to your car.”

  Walters walked toward me. He wore smoky dark glasses, even in the dark hallway, and he waved a white cane in front of himself. The cane didn’t touch anything. The tip just floated a few inches off the ground and away from the wall. Walters didn’t exactly look in my direction. I gathered that sight wasn’t the sense he was relying on, anyway. He pulled a silver case from the inside pocket of his blazer and opened it. I looked to see what the silver case held. Business cards. He slid a card out like it was the end of a magic trick. Ta-da. The card was in my hand before I could think to refuse it. Dr. Benengeli spun Walters and led him down the hallway away from me.

  I read the card:

  FRANK WALTERS

  CONSUMER LIAISON

  DICKINSON AND ASSOCIATES

  The address was on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. He had an office phone number there and a cell number with a 212 area code. I thought, 212? Manhattan?

  I looked back down the hall. Dr. Benengeli and Frank Walters were gone. I scratched my chin with the card. Something seemed off. I couldn’t put my finger on it. I returned to my seat and faced the window. The bluebird still sat on a high branch of a fir sapling. The sun burned away at the gray of the morning. Mist from the Pacific that had settled on the rocky hills around me started to fall away like a silk slip falling off the back of a chair. I tried to make sense of things.

  Could Walters be a patient? Patients weren’t allowed into the Williams Building. That would explain Dr. Benengeli shooing him away. But what was she doing up here? How did she know there was an errant patient? And why would she go after him herself? Wrangling wandering patients was the jurisdiction of psych techs. And what about that business card? Why would a patient be carrying a business card? While I was no authority on clothes, I had spent some time in a discount department store lately. That jacket Frank Walters wore had not come off a bargain rack. There was money behind the purchase of a blazer like that. His sunglasses alone must have cost more than my whole wardrobe. And it’s not that people who own these items don’t show up in a psych hospital; it’s just that they don’t wear their big money clothes here. Most patients show up wearing the clothes they’d wear if they were changing the oil in their car. Also, Dr. Benengeli had offered to walk him to his car, not to his room. Which would make a certain amount of sense if she knew he didn’t have a room in the hospital, but why would she assume that a blind man had a car? Something was fishy.