Madhouse Fog

by Sean Carswell

  Before I could figure out what was going on, my phone rang. It was someone from the Beatty Foundation for Mental Health. A grant possibility. I got back to work.

  Ten minutes later, my phone call was done and Dr. Benengeli poked her head into my office. She didn’t offer a greeting or loiter with any small talk. She got right to the point. “I don’t want to tell you how to do your job or where to look for funding,” she said, “but be careful around that guy.”

  “What?” I closed my three-ring binder and leveled my eyes at hers.

  “Why?”

  Dr. Benengeli looked at her watch. “Crap. I have a ten o’clock group. I’ve got to run. Just be careful.” She vanished down the hallway.

  My phone rang. The caller ID told me the call was coming from the 212 area code. I answered. “This is Frank Walters of Dickinson and Associates,” he said. “I’d like to talk to you about donating money to your institution. Can I take you to lunch on Thursday, say, one o’clock?”

  “Sure,” I said. I opened my nearly empty appointment book. Under the page listed for Thursday and the time listed for 1:00 PM, I wrote: Frank Walters. Lunch. I also wrote the name of the restaurant where he wanted to meet. And then added Be careful.

  5

  Of course there was a catch. Dr. Bishop gave me the puppy, sure, but she asked for a favor in return. She promised it would be a small favor but now I had a Roads and Grounds guy hooking up a timer and a surveillance camera in the front entranceway of my apartment. I wasn’t sure what to make of this either.

  The Roads and Grounds guy’s name was Eric. He was a white guy with one of those autobiographical faces: hard and rocky, full of crevices and ravines and the lingering effects of time. It was a face that told the story of a man who’d had his feather earring and his Trans Am with an eagle painted on the hood, who’d smoked his Camels and drank his CC and Ginger, who’d learned the after-hours secrets of women who spent their evenings in dive bars, who’d surfaced on the other side worn and scarred but without regret. Or at least without any regret he’d admit to. It was the kind of face that I would hire if I were hiring because you don’t get a face like that if you don’t find a way to show up for work every Monday morning after spending a Friday, Saturday, and Sunday blowing the lion’s share of what you’d earned the previous week. Perhaps it was this face that led Dr. Bishop to trust Eric. Regardless, he looked very trustworthy as he capped wires and double-checked connections.

  The surveillance camera fit in the drawer of the small side table positioned by the front door. Eric had brought the table with him. It was the kind of furniture purchased from a big box store; the kind you take home and assemble with a Phillips-head screwdriver and a hammer for the tiny nails. The newspaper rack/table actually matched the rest of the cheap furniture in my apartment perfectly. I wondered how Eric or Dr. Bishop had known this would be the case. Then I remembered that I was a man in my mid-30s who lived in an apartment, wore discount department store clothes, and waited patiently for his wife to leave Fresno, though signs were pointing more and more to the notion that she was not going to leave. Of course I’d have assemble-it-yourself, pressed-wood furniture.

  Eric took the knob off the drawer. He asked me to hold one edge of his tape measure flush against the drawer, where the knob had been. He pulled his end of the tape to the middle of the tile foyer adjacent to my front door. He sized up the angle of the tape. He told me I could let go. He then positioned a drill to enter the table at roughly the angle that the tape had shown him. He drilled a hole there. The lens of the camera fit in Eric’s new hole. Using door shims, Eric supported the camera in the drawer. He filled the rest of the drawer with styrofoam peanuts. When all seemed sturdy, he shut the drawer, saying, “You won’t even notice this.”

  “And the whole idea is to film my floor?” I asked.

  “To film what happens on that floor in the fifteen minutes prior to you coming home.”

  “What do you think is gonna happen?”

  “It’s not what I think. It’s what Dr. Bishop thinks that matters.”

  “And what does she think is gonna happen?”

  “She thinks your pup here is gonna sit in that spot and stare at the door.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Maybe wag his tale.”

  “That’ll be one exciting movie,” I said.

  Eric smiled. His teeth were shockingly white, the kind of bleached bones you can get from over-the-counter teeth whiteners. His eyes backed up the smile. “It actually could make for an interesting movie, if you give it enough time.”

  I raised an eyebrow. Clearly there was something more going on here that I didn’t understand.

  Eric kneeled in front of his toolbox. He carefully arranged his tools, in order. With a four-inch paintbrush, he swept the shavings that his drill had left on my foyer tile onto a sheet of paper. He folded the shavings into the paper, careful not to let any slip out. He stuffed the paper and paintbrush into his toolbox. He stood up. “That’ll do ’er,” he said.

  My new pup came over at this point. Perhaps he sensed that Eric was about to leave and it was time to go for a walk. He trotted over with his little legs and big paws. In another year, he’d be a decent-sized dog. He’d grow to maybe forty or forty-five pounds. I’d have to get a place with a little yard so there’d be enough room for the two of us. For the time being, he was still small enough for me to scoop up and hold on my forearm, if I wanted to. I didn’t at the moment. The pup nuzzled against my leg. Eric bent to pet him. He said to the dog, “You must be the little gift from Dr. Bishop.”

  I watched Eric rub his fingers through the pup’s short fur. It was the same brownish gray of a koala or the hair on my head. This was one more thing I liked about the pup: when I found short gray hairs around the apartment, I could tell myself that they were the pup’s and not mine. As long as I stayed away from mirrors, I could believe it. “The timing couldn’t have been better with this guy,” I told Eric. “We had to put Nietzsche to sleep the day before.”

  “Nietzsche?”

  “That’s what my wife and I named our last dog. Nietzsche.”

  Eric looked around my front room. A few scattered newspapers, a couch I’d picked up at a thrift store, a once-nice recliner with dark armrest stains from the oil of my hands, an assemble-it-yourself, pressed-wood coffee table, an ancient television with a rabbit-ears antenna and a dial instead of push-buttons sitting on a two-tiered rolling cart, a turntable underneath the TV, and a cardboard box full of old LPs. “You got a wife around here?”

  “In Fresno. She should be moving down here any day now,” I said. I don’t know if either of us believed me.

  Eric nodded politely. “That’s a lot of weight to put on a little dog’s shoulders, naming him Nietzsche.”

  “I learned my lesson.” Though maybe I hadn’t. I named the new pup Clint Dempsey, after the kid who scored the only goal for the US national team in the 2006 World Cup. Clint Dempsey. Maybe that name is a lot of responsibility to give a dog, too. But if you didn’t see the US/Ghana game when Clint Dempsey scored, let me tell you, it was one hell of a goal. “Anyway,” I said, “it was a lucky coincidence, Dr. Bishop coming along with this pup when she did.”

  Eric gave me half a smile, a little bit of bleached bones squeaking out. “Coincidence?”

  I nodded. “Yeah. Coincidence.”

  “If you study metaphysics, there are no coincidences.”

  “I don’t study metaphysics.”

  Twenty minutes later, Clint Dempsey and I walked through the park near my apartment. Eric’s truck sat parked in front of my apartment building. I did not know why but I didn’t give it much thought either. I threw an old tennis ball for Clint Dempsey. The tennis ball possessed him. Nothing would stand between him and that ball, once it started moving. He crashed through little stands of bushes, he danced over the century-old roots of a gnarled oak, he shaved the lint off the jeans of passing park goers. All in pursuit of that ball. He knew no obstacle.
At one point, he even gathered such a head of steam going downhill that gravity thrust him into a somersault. He regained his feet and still scooped up the ball before it stopped rolling. Just like his namesake. Clint Dempsey would win the ball.

  I sat at the top of the park’s hill, throwing the ball anew every time Clint Dempsey returned. The park spread out in front of me, lush and green. A paramedic lay in the grass, napping while his partner wandered around, listening to headphones. A couple held hands and meandered downhill. Four young men—flannel-shirted, beanies pulled down over their ears, fingers black from a day’s work on the row crops east and south of town—gathered around a park bench, a joint passing between them. Ancient flat gravestones caught the occasional flash of the waning sunlight. These gravestones had long been abandoned by loved ones, the graveyard too spooky to build on but too beautiful to leave alone. Hence, this park. On the horizon, the sun scraped the ridgeline of islands on the horizon, leaving the Pacific aglow in orange.

  A beer would taste good right now. Clint Dempsey brought me the ball. I threw it. He darted off. A woman jogged by on the sidewalk below me. The #6 city bus shuddered to a stop in front of the park. The farm workers crushed their joint and hurried over, bus passes visible before the doors were open.

  I heard footsteps behind me. I turned to look. Eric was back. He had a plastic bag from the nearby convenience store. “What’s the law on drinking beer in this park?”

  “I guess that depends on who’s drinking it and how much they’re drinking.”

  “You and me.” Eric pulled a large bottle of brown ale out of his bag and handed it to me. He stripped the plastic bag off a second, identical bottle. “And one apiece.”

  I dug my key ring out of my pocket. I’d kept a bottle opener on the key ring from the days when drinking used to be a bit of a hobby. The bottle opener still came in handy occasionally. I opened my bottle and traded with Eric. He handed me the unopened bottle and I solved that problem. “I guess it’s all right,” I said.

  Clint Dempsey came back and I threw the ball again.

  “Tell me about metaphysics,” I said.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “What’s up with the camera you installed in my apartment?”

  “Didn’t Dr. Bishop tell you?”

  “She gave me a form to sign. I didn’t read it, though.”

  “But you signed it?”

  “Yep,” I said. “I didn’t care what the form said. I just wanted the dog.” Which was half the truth. I still wasn’t fully ready to face the other half. Just as I hadn’t been able to bring myself to drive to Fresno for Nietzsche’s last day, I couldn’t bring myself to read the form Dr. Bishop had given me. That little something in my psyche prevented it. For the third time, I acted counter to my typical self. The third presence of that little voice in my psyche left me a little worried.

  “He’s a good dog,” Eric said.

  I watched Clint Dempsey leap over the napping paramedic and snatch the ball on a short hop. “That he is.”

  Eric lifted his baseball cap, scratched his gray-blond hair, and replaced the cap. He sipped his brown ale. He dug his work boots into the park grass. He did not say anything more about the camera. Clint Dempsey came back. I threw the ball again.

  “Southpaw?” Eric asked.

  “I don’t know what kind of dog he is,” I said. “Mostly mutt, I think, but it looks like you can see a bit of hound in his face. Those droopy eyes, you know.”

  “Not the dog. You.” Eric mimed a throw with his left arm.

  “Yep. I’m left-handed.”

  A moment of silence passed. In honor of what, I don’t know. The earth kept spinning to fill the space between the sun and me. I asked Eric again, “What’s up with the camera?”

  “I’m not good at explaining it.”

  “Do your best. No judgment here.”

  Eric fiddled with the bill of his ball cap. “Dr. Bishop is doing an experiment about the way we talk to one another without talking. Nonverbal communication.”

  “Okay.”

  “Like, do we talk to our dogs?”

  “We give them commands. I know that’s verbal but I don’t think they speak the language.”

  Eric smiled. “But beyond that?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m sure our body language says a lot.”

  Eric shook his head. “Dr. Bishop is looking for something less direct. She’s trying to figure out if we talk to them in another realm of communication. Like, do they know when we’re coming home? Can they somehow sense this?”

  “How could they?” I asked.

  Eric paused and took a sip of beer. Clint Dempsey returned with the ball. I tossed it down the hill. He took off in hot pursuit.

  I asked, “So what’s this other realm of communication? Telepathy?”

  Eric winced. “Not telepathy. Dr. Bishop hates that word.”

  I smiled. “Okay.” A little, embarrassed laugh slipped out. “So she’s not testing to see if we’re all sending telepathic messages to animals like we’re Aquaman. But she is seeing if there is some sort of non-verbal, non-physical communication that we have with our pets.”

  “Something like that.”

  It all seemed silly to me. I didn’t want to say so to Eric. Something in Eric’s wince signaled that he was somehow invested in this research. I backed off a little. “So you set up the camera to click on at a certain time, right before I’m supposed to come home, and film to see whether the dog reacts?”

  “Exactly.”

  “But wouldn’t there be obvious problems? Like, how do you know that the dog isn’t reacting to the sound of the camera turning on?”

  “That’s what the packing foam is all about. To muffle the sound.”

  “Dogs hear pretty well.”

  “There is an element of classical conditioning,” Eric said. “To get around that, Dr. Bishop has me set the time to click on a few hours before you typically get home. Mostly we want to see if the dogs react.”

  Clint Dempsey reacted. He dropped the tennis ball between Eric’s legs. Eric tossed the ball downhill. Clint Dempsey pursued.

  I took this little break to come to a quick conclusion. I analyzed the comfort with which he used the term “classical conditioning.” I chewed on his use of the second person plural pronoun. We. As in “we want to see.” Not that Dr. Bishop wanted to see. Eric wanted to see, too. He must’ve had some kind of stake in this research. So I tested him. “Does this have anything do with the collective unconscious?”

  “Yep. That’s exactly it,” Eric said. The orange light of the sunset settled into the crevices on his face. He stared off toward the Pacific. He didn’t say more. It seemed like he’d given me my first clue but I wasn’t sure what to do with it.

  6

  On the Wednesday before my Thursday lunch with Frank “Castor Oil” Walters, I dined alone on a picnic bench on psych hospital grounds. A cool Pacific wind sifted through the thin fabric of my discount department store clothes, but the warm sun countered the wind. It created a nice balance. About twenty yards to my left, a group of patients engaged in a pseudo-game of croquet. Psych techs kept a close eye on the game. One doctor patiently explained the rules, showed the patients the proper way to swing the mallet, and showed them the non-threatening way to hold the mallet between their turns. The patients were not high functioning. They wandered away from the course. Psych techs wrangled them back.

  To my right, squirrels darted in and about a knotty manzanita tree. They barked and ran. I ate my sandwich. Salami and provolone on rye bread. A little bit of mustard. One squirrel had an acorn in his mouth. He seemed to lead the pack. The other squirrels chased him. I wondered what was behind it all. What thoughts ran through the tiny brains of these squirrels? Did they want to steal the acorn from their neighbor? With so many oak trees on the premises, so many acorns on the ground and in the trees, why take the time to steal this one? Why not just go snag an easily accessible acorn? Or maybe this wa
s a game, like rugby or something. Catch the Squirrel with the Acorn. Maybe they had elaborate rules for Catch the Squirrel with the Acorn. Maybe goals could be scored, winners declared. Maybe they had practices and tournaments, acorn-holding champions and retired acorn-holding stars who thought wistfully about the glory days of running with their acorns, never getting caught. And, if so, there must be defensive stars as well: burly squirrels who knew the proper angle of pursuit to capture that acorn with the least amount of effort, fearless squirrels willing to forgo their own safety to launch out of acorn-filled trees in pursuit of the acorn runner. Or perhaps this was no game at all, but an elaborate mating ritual. Perhaps, in the squirrel kingdom, the male squirrel demonstrates his value by carrying the acorn; the female shows her love in the pursuit. Perhaps this one squirrel winding around the knotty branches of the manzanita tree was actually a lucky dude. Two females in pursuit. He’d let one catch him.

  No, I didn’t want to think about that. Personifying squirrels as jocks was all easy enough. A harmless daydream. Personifying love in squirrels, though, brought me to that sensitive area of my mind that I was trying to dodge. In fact, the mental activities of my lunch all had to do with an elaborate game of repression and evasion. I didn’t want to think about Dr. Bishop’s camera in my foyer or the experiment behind it; I didn’t want to think about my meeting with Frank “Castor Oil” Walters; I didn’t want to think about The Professor or my existence or how much of it might be my imagination protecting me from madness. And I definitely didn’t want to think about Lola Diaz, whom I hadn’t seen since my first day at the psych hospital.