Madhouse Fog

by Sean Carswell

  Lola had spent a good deal of time lately wandering through the alleys and passageways of my mind. Old memories were dragged to the surface of my consciousness. Lola unearthed thoughts and feelings long ago discarded. When this happened, I sought solace in The Professor’s philosophy. I tried to convince myself that maybe it was all a fiction. Maybe there was no Lola Diaz. Maybe I’d just created all the thoughts and feelings and memories as a way to ward off the madness inherent in a fleeting, meaningless existence. Maybe…

  “Is it really you?”

  I’d been so lost in thought that I hadn’t heard her walk up. It was almost as if she glided in on the wind of my thoughts. I turned to look, though I already knew.

  I said, “Hey, Lola.”

  She sat next to me in a blur of past and present. She’d spent the last twenty years frozen in the amber of my memory, forever sixteen years old. Now I had to update her in my mind. Some things hadn’t changed: that cute little nose, her plump lips, her irises the soft brown of Sugar Babies. She still didn’t wear make-up. In general, everything about her had gotten a little bit bigger. Her cheeks were a little rounder; her breasts took a wider curve. With her low-cut polyester shirt showing me so much of those particular curves—the olive skin going pale in the sunlight—I had to make sure that my line of vision shot up to less invasive regions. Her brown hair still hung ironed straight with that precise part right down the middle. At first, I thought she’d dyed highlighted streaks in it. Looking closer, though, there was no hair dye. Gray hairs had infiltrated in too great a number to pluck but not with enough force to take over. So this was Lola Diaz at thirty-seven. I had no idea she’d be so beautiful.

  Lola smiled. “It is you,” she said. “I thought I’d seen you around. What are you doing here?”

  I held up the remaining half of my salami and provolone sandwich. “Just having lunch.”

  “I meant here.” Lola pointed down at the table. “You know. Here.”

  “You mean in the psych hospital?”

  “Exactly.”

  “I work here. I’m a grant writer.”

  “I see.” Lola nodded. I wondered if that was a look of disappointment on her face. Was she let down by my employee status? Had she hoped for me to say, “I’m a patient,” and share my tale of woe? She stared down at the table. I tried to figure out what she was looking at. Nothing lay in front of her but rough planks of wood and flaking paint. I thought to ask her what she was here for but I couldn’t bring myself to. She deserved her privacy.

  I started to lift my left hand to scratch my cheek. Halfway to my face, Lola reached out and grabbed the gold band on my left ring finger. She touched it with her thumb and middle finger in a way that kept her skin from touching my skin. Still, I felt like I could feel her skin so close to mine, like the static electricity of her fingers were making the small hairs on my hand rise. Lola let go of my wedding ring. She said, “Pack up your lunch. I want to show you something.”

  When I think of the stories that my mind has created to explain how I got here, I remember things this way: Lola and I had gone to high school together. That was in Folsom. There wasn’t much to Folsom when we lived there. Not much to make it different from any other farming town in that middle California agricultural belt. We had a prison that Johnny Cash made famous in a song. We had a lot of hills and rocky pastures that made for good dirt bike paths. That’s about all I remember. And I don’t even remember the prison so much as I know the Johnny Cash song. I’ve heard that Folsom became more suburban since absorbing the Sacramento overflow, nurturing outlet malls and chain restaurants and big box stores. I can’t say for sure. My parents moved away from Folsom when I was in college. I haven’t been back since.

  Swimming in that shallow pool of Folsom memories is sixteen-year-old Lola Diaz, already looking like a woman even though I still look like a gangly, skinny boy who hasn’t quite mastered the mechanics of a body fresh from a teenage growth spurt. The womanly Lola Diaz comes up to the kid version of me at my locker. I brush my long hair out of my eyes. In my sixteen-year-old mind, I look like a Ramone with my tight jeans and leather motorcycle jacket and shaggy hair.

  With the perspective of the impossible number of years that had passed since then, I realized that I looked nothing like a Ramone and Lola didn’t care about the Ramones, anyway.

  In that pool of memory, she says to me, “I heard you were going to take me out to a diner for pie and ice cream after school.” Her cracking voice undermines the confidence of her words.

  I say, “You heard right,” trying hard to sound cool and failing to an equal degree.

  Out of that exchange, a first date was born. That first date doesn’t really swim in my shallow pool of memories. I remember more an amalgam of dates and meetings and times at the diners and slices of pie and doing everything we could do before six o’clock but never going out on an evening date with Lola. Not even on weekends.

  I remembered sixteen-year-old Lola asking me out as thirty-seven-year-old Lola led me across the psych hospital grounds toward the largely unused North Quad. Perhaps it had something to do with the way her hips swayed when she walked, so brazen and smooth that there had to be a Pandora’s box of insecurities behind this practiced confidence. Or maybe not. Maybe she was just walking. “Are you taking me to the Alzheimer’s lab?” I asked.

  “I don’t remember,” she said.

  She smiled to show me she was kidding. Crow’s-feet crinkled around her eyes, so striking for a mind that had barely updated Lola to an adult. I got the joke.

  Lola led me through a parking lot that held no cars. The pavement was worn down to that point where it couldn’t be smooth again. Tiny pebbles jutted out of the eroded tar. Weeds grew through cracks.

  Beyond the parking lot stood an ancient red brick dorm that hadn’t been renovated with the rest of the hospital. This dorm was so forgotten that the administration hadn’t mentioned it when they talked about finding funding for renovation of various hospital buildings. Lola stopped at the side entrance of the dorm. “I need you to open the door,” she said.

  I reached for the ring of keys on my belt. “I’m not sure if I can.”

  “It’s not locked. It’s just heavy.” Lola showed me how to grab the handle and told me to lift up, then pull out. I tried it. The door groaned under its own weight. Dust and flakes of weather-stripping rubber fluttered onto my hand. I pushed in with my shoulder and yanked up. The door broke free of the spontaneous seal of paint where its edge rested against the doorframe. I tugged the door back to me. It obeyed.

  Just as Lola said, the door was heavy. The main problem being a broken hinge on the top of the door. I gently let the door rest, its bottom edge on the concrete ramp leading to the entrance. The sun cut a broad swath of light down the otherwise dark hallway. Lola led the way inside.

  “This building was the art dorm back in the Winfield University days. I used to live here.”

  “You went to Winfield?” I said. It wasn’t a question so much as an inarticulate way of saying, “I didn’t know you went to Winfield.”

  Lola didn’t answer. She led me down the dark hallway. Both sides were flanked by barren rooms: closets without closet doors, linoleum floors stained where feet rested in front of long lost chairs and scuffed by the legs of desks and beds that had long been auctioned off. Only dust and spiders stayed in these rooms. Even the doors lacked doorknobs. We passed a former bathroom. A few bathroom stall walls still stood, but the sinks and toilets were gone, the plumbing capped off. The lobby adjacent to the stairway was equally naked. Not even the carpet remained. Just swirls of ancient glue stuck to the concrete floor.

  Lola climbed the first flight of stairs. “My room was on the third floor,” she said.

  “Is that where you’re taking me?”

  “No,” Lola said. “I don’t live there anymore.”

  We headed down the second floor hallway, directly above where we’d just come from. Without the light from the side door, I couldn’t
see much. I asked myself the following two questions: is Lola a patient here? And, if so, is it advisable for me, an employee of the psychiatric institution, to walk down a dark, deserted hallway with a patient, particularly if said patient is the second woman I ever loved? I wrestled with the first question first.

  I figured that Lola must either be a patient or an employee. I hadn’t noticed her at the all-staff meeting on my first day, but it had been my first day and I had been nervous. Surely I hadn’t looked at everyone in that large lecture hall. And all the staff hadn’t been there anyway. I hadn’t seen her at any other employee function or in any of the places where the employees typically congregated to avoid the patients. There was the key test, too. Dr. Benengeli had told me on the first day that, if in doubt whether someone was a patient or an employee, look for keys. All of us employees carried a huge ring of keys so that we could get into and out of the various administration buildings. A huge ring of keys usually signified an employee. We were forever locking and unlocking doors. Sometimes patients picked up on this and did what they could to assemble a ring of lost keys. So the test wasn’t foolproof. Still, it worked well enough that the staff kicked up a fuss when the administration proposed replacing all the keys with a single key fob that could get you in and out of anywhere on site.

  Lola carried no keys. I couldn’t ignore this. Also, if I’m going to be honest here, I should admit that I’d searched the faculty directory for her name. Her name was not listed. Clearly the chances were less than fifty/fifty that she was an employee.

  I’d seen her in the group session in the dual diagnosis dorm on my first day. It was possible she was an intern sitting in on a group. If I really wanted to believe this, I guess I could make myself believe it. The evidence pointed otherwise so it seemed likely that Lola was a patient. Her presence in the dual diagnosis group session suggested that she was a high-functioning patient. That was a plus. Her presence there also suggested that she had some kind of chemical dependency as well as a mental illness. I added it up. Based on the information at my disposal, the answer to my two questions would have to be: yes and no. In that particular order.

  I walked behind Lola in that dark hallway, watching the brazen sway of her hips, and wondered what chemical she was dependent on. She had too much flesh around her bones, she was too full-figured of a woman to be addicted to speed or crystal meth or crack. Which was good. I wanted to eliminate those possibilities as soon as possible. Heroin was another possibility, but surely that would’ve been painted on her face right from the beginning. I would’ve noticed the tracks on her bare arms when she touched my wedding ring. I would’ve seen the sunken eyes when I met her glance. So what then? Marijuana. Maybe. It seemed far-fetched to think someone would need rehab for weed, but it didn’t even take a week at the psych hospital to learn that courts order rehab for potheads. And my last job in Fresno showed me that you don’t have to be physically addicted to a substance for it to deteriorate your life. So maybe weed. Cocaine was a possibility. If she were in the early stages of addiction, she could still have both a problem and all those curves. And, of course, there was always alcohol: the Occam’s Razor solution to this.

  Lola reached the end of the hallway. A sheet of plywood leaned against the window there. Lola grabbed one side and said, “Give me a hand. We’ll lean it up against the wall behind you.”

  “Got it,” I said. I picked up the plywood and moved it away from the window. The new light brought to life a series of icons and comics and colors and logos.

  “Now, I don’t want you to judge me by this,” Lola said. “I was in college. Fifteen years have passed. I’m much better now.”

  I nodded. “Did you do this?”

  “Guilty.”

  “I wasn’t expecting this at all.”

  “How very evasive of you to say.”

  “Give me a second,” I said. “Let me drink it all in.”

  The window cast light on a series of portraits that stretched from floor to ceiling, door to door, on the west wall of the dorm. In one mural, Marilyn Monroe played strip poker with John F. Kennedy. Styrofoam fast food cartons and waxed paper cups with prominent logos littered the poker table. In another, Bill Gates emerged as an infant from a computer screen, his coiled umbilical cord leading to a keyboard. Another mural featured Jesus, the Buddha, Confucius, an eight-armed Shiva, a gray-haired and white-robed Western God, and various other deities waiting in line at the DMV. They held tickets in their hands that read, “Your number is…” All of their numbers were between 161 and 169. A sign behind the DMV counter read “NOW SERVING: 003.” And so on. Clever, well-executed bits of obvious satire. Nothing for a fine art gallery, but perfect for a college student to paint in a college dorm.

  “I’m impressed,” I said.

  Lola pointed at the open window. “I started at that end and finished over there by the stairs,” she said. “The better paintings are down there.”

  True to Lola’s word, I found the most striking mural nearest the stairs. It was a simple scene: two cartoon squirrels at a picnic table, eating sandwiches and watching a bunch of tiny humans build a city in a gnarled oak tree. The landscape around them mirrored the campus outside the dorm. The painting itself mirrored my thoughts at the exact moment when Lola approached me earlier. I remembered Eric’s words: “If you study metaphysics, there are no coincidences.” I thought, nope. It’s too simple. If you believe in common human experience, that the campus occupied these grounds for more than a century and over the course of that time, surely hundreds of people sat at the picnic benches, eating sandwiches and watching squirrels. That’s what the picnic benches were for: to eat at. Sandwiches have long been the most popular American lunch food. And surely the squirrels had been around for as long as the acorns had. Nothing metaphysical was going on here.

  “How’d you get the school to let you paint on the dorm walls?”

  “I told them it was a celebration of my cultural heritage.”

  “Are murals big in Puerto Rico?” I asked. Because I recalled this from my puddle of Folsom memories: that Lola was Puerto Rican.

  Lola smiled, a sharp mouth on a round face. Trouble. “You think a bunch of white liberal arts professors know the difference between Mexican and PR?” Lola shook her head. “Hell, no.”

  “Well, well done,” I said. “I’m impressed.”

  “I’m better now,” Lola said. “I still paint. You should see my new stuff.” She looked at her watch. “Oops. I better scoot. One o’clock group.”

  I followed Lola down the stairs to the first floor. She checked her watch again and looked up at me. “I’m really late,” she said. She reached out for my left hand, touched my wedding ring again, shot me with a dose of static electricity, and trotted off.

  I stood in the hallway and watched her go. She turned into a silhouette in the doorway and vanished in the California sun.

  7

  I spent the morning before my lunch with Frank Walters in my office, doing research on the computer. I looked up everything I could find on Dickinson and Associates. I checked their company website, read all the easily available information on them from a quick web search, then dug deeper, reading about them in articles written for business journals, checking reports for stockholders—though, of course, I wasn’t a stockholder. I also did several searches for a Frank Walters, but the names were just too common and I couldn’t find anything that matched who I thought this Frank Walters was. No luck with Francis Walters, either. I slipped and tried Frank “Castor Oil” Walters. I actually typed it into a search engine and clicked “search” before it occurred to me that the “Castor Oil” part of his name only existed in my mind. I searched and read steadily from seven o’clock that morning until ten thirty. This is the long story short of what I found:

  J. Reginald Dickinson, an Australian who’d cut his teeth interning in the upper echelons of a mass media corporation there, founded the firm. After the internship, he moved into advertising. His first big break came
in a United Fruit campaign for which he developed the slogan “Life Is Good When You Have a Big Banana.” I found a series of ads featuring this cartoon monkey in some presumably Latin American jungle, happy as hell about the big banana in his hand. The ads were actually a bit more subtle than I expected, though they were not subtle. The United Fruit campaign catapulted Dickinson into the advertising big time. He moved his upstart company to New York City, actually landing an address on Madison Avenue (though apparently a bit south of the insiders’ stretch of Madison Avenue). From this location, he developed other projects that have surely burrowed into your subconscious: The Cattle Ranchers of America’s whole “You Can’t Beat Our Meat” campaign; Big Sugar’s “Even God Has a Sweet Tooth” push. His loosely veiled dick jokes and pseudo-religion moved the company up to a more fashionable address. From there, Dickinson created the two most controversial and short-lived Miller Beer campaigns: “Drink Her Pretty,” which featured 30-second TV spots with geeky, frumped-out women gradually losing their disguises and transforming into strippers while fat men who were way out of the women’s leagues got drunk, and “If Moms Made Miller, You’d Still Be Breastfeeding”—a series of billboards with sloppy, unshaven men in diapers tugging at giant apron strings, the apron barely covering a pair of dazzling legs in high heels. He was even the guy behind Taco Bell’s “Heaven in a Taco” campaign, the one with the striking Chicana’s face appearing in the lettuce of a fast food taco, apparently some reference to the Virgen de Guadalupe, only this lady says, “Eat me.” And so on.

  He expanded the company into public relations with his specialty being the shadow campaign, in which he’d create a manufactured buzz surrounding a product or an idea through non-traditional means. For example, in the ’80s when a certain congressman from North Carolina was in hot water for some unethical practices with lobbyists and he was trailing dangerously behind in his re-election campaign, the congressman hired J. Reginald Dickinson to clear things up. Since even Dickinson couldn’t spit shine this congressman’s image, Dickinson attacked the congressman’s opponent. The opponent, among other things, was campaigning to dedicate more money to AIDS research. Dickinson and Associates created a team of writers to produce opinion pieces that promulgated one simple catch phrase: “AIDS is God’s Will.” For the more radical publications, the writers would argue that AIDS attacked a demographic that needed to be attacked. In publications that welcomed unambiguous brutality, writers would make assertions like, “I’ll worry about AIDS when it kills people I don’t hate.” Non-Dickinson writers started to pick up on the trend, attacking the new wave of writers and their hateful opinions. This created exactly the kind of buzz that the congressman needed to inspire his homophobic constituents to get to the voting booth that November. He won a narrow victory and was back to getting blowjobs from lobbyist-funded hookers in no time. As far as I can tell, none of those hookers had AIDS. There was no delicious irony here.