Madhouse Fog

by Sean Carswell

  When word of the first Dickinson and Associates shadow campaign spread, the company really took off. They were able to employ radio and television personalities whose opinions were for hire. They worked on political campaigns large and small, from several different points on the political spectrum. They became masters of digging at the loose hangnail of America’s id. They also became more subtle because I couldn’t find much information on who they worked for or what they worked on. Dickinson and Associates clients clearly valued their privacy.

  The last big campaign I could find that Dickinson and Associates had their fingers in was the re-imagining of School of the Americas. The School of the Americas was a facility on an army base in Georgia. Some of the alumni of this school included Chilean dictator General Augustus Pinochet and the men behind the brutal El Mozote Massacre in El Salvador. Congressional investigators had even unearthed SOA training manuals that taught the finer intricacies of torture. Every year, protestors gathered in huge numbers and rallied outside the gates of the SOA demanding its closure. After several years of protests, the US Army hired Dickinson and Associates to clear this mess up. Dickinson and Associates came up with a plan. They suggested that the army close the SOA, just as the protestors asked, but to start a new facility with the same teachers, classrooms, students, and curriculum. This new facility would be called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. WHISC. This way, no one could complain about the SOA, no one could remember the name of the new facility, and if they tried to use the new acronym, it would sound pleasant. WHISC. Like a breath of fresh air.

  The army changed the signs. This fractured all the sound bites around the protests. Everyone was happy. Well, except the protestors and the people who were tortured by WHISC alumni. But now they sounded like whiners because what more did they want? The SOA was closed. WHISC didn’t have that horrible history. Et cetera.

  At ten-thirty that morning, I’d had enough of my internet searches. I wasn’t sure what to believe and I didn’t really want to believe any of it. I wanted to shrink the world back down to my little office in the maze of the Williams Building, to federal grants and psych hospital patients and January California breezes. I wanted to think about my shallow pool of Folsom memories, afternoons whiling away in the Diaz family’s formal living room, sitting on an embroidered couch under wrought iron candleholders and a painting of San Juan city streets, watching Lola slide a Cure record into its sleeve, careful to touch only the edges of the record. Lola would spray all her records with rubbing alcohol and gently brush the grooves before putting them on the turntable. She would sit on the wooden living room floor, stare at the zigzag patterns of the area rug, and sing all the sad words of her favorite British pop stars. I had come to love music I would’ve otherwise hated, if only because each familiar wail made me feel like Lola was in the room.

  Piggy-backed on that memory, of course, was the old living room grandfather clock striking five-thirty, the harried look of Lola saying, “My dad will be home soon,” the rush of sweeping me out and clearing away any sign of my presence before her father’s six o’clock return time.

  I cracked open my office window to feel a little January breeze. A psych tech and The Professor strolled along the walkway that stretched between the Williams Building and the dual diagnosis dorm. I tried to imagine what The Professor might say about Dickinson and Associates. Would he tell me to question the sources, ask how reliable the websites of corporations, protestors, and business magazines really were? Would he take the larger road and ask me what it meant to develop a view of the world beyond my own, based upon the ephemeral words I read off a glowing screen? Would he chastise me for developing opinions about places I’d never go and people I’d never meet when all the while I couldn’t prove to him that my hands were really mine or that I was more than just a butterfly dreaming I was a grant writer?

  I needed to talk to people so I called an old bandmate of mine, a guy named Brandon Burch. Two things about Brandon Burch: 1. We’d been friends a long time ago, and as years stretched away from the original point of the friendship, I spent a lot of time questioning why we’d ever been friends; and 2. He worked down in Los Angeles on Wilshire Boulevard, where a bunch of advertising agencies are gathered. The area is known as the Miracle Mile, though there is no miracle about that stretch of Wilshire Boulevard, and it’s not a mile long.

  Brandon was in his office and picked up on the second ring. First things first, we dealt with small talk. “What’s up with you?” Brandon asked. “Still trying to save the world?”

  “Nope,” I said. In a way, even answering the question was a confession that I had once been trying to save the world. I did not intend to make such a confession. I didn’t believe it to be true. I never lived through a period so idealistic that I thought I—the wannabe Ramone from Folsom—could save the world.

  “So you’re not at the nonprofit anymore?”

  “Nope.”

  “What was it again? A hippie commune?”

  And, see, this was exactly why I wondered how I’d ever become friends with a guy like Brandon Burch. He knew that I’d worked at a community space, that there was nothing hippie about it, and that we weren’t trying to save the world. We held free resume-writing workshops for blue-collar people, provided lunch for the homeless, hosted art exhibits and poetry readings for the Fresno State students. That kind of thing. I was the only employee of the space, and I only got a salary because I wrote the grant that gave me the salary. And, truth be told, I wrote all the grants that kept that place up and running. I knew that in the next minute, Brandon would make fun of my very modest salary. Which he did.

  He said, “Still paying yourself Cup-O-Noodles wages?”

  “Those days are over,” I said. “I’m working as a grant writer at a psych hospital now. It’s pays a good salary, benefits, you name it. I have a tie around my neck as we speak.” Which was true. I had put on a tie that morning.

  “I’ll be damned.” A few seconds of silence filled the line. An intentional pause. Brandon ended it with, “How’s your wife? You still married?”

  “Yep. She’s doing good. We had to put Nietzsche down, though.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.” He paused again, for a shorter moment this time. “What does the afterlife hold for a dog that believes God is dead?”

  “Do you think Nietzsche the dog believed that?” I asked.

  Brandon said, “We better get to the point. You didn’t call me to talk about dogs and philosophers. So what is this all about? Shoot.”

  “You know a guy named Frank Walters? Works for Dickinson and Associates?”

  “Who’s asking?”

  “I’m asking.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m supposed to have lunch with him today.”

  “Ouch,” Brandon said. The pain was clearly non-physical. “Be careful.”

  “And why is that?”

  “He’s a dangerous dude.”

  “Dangerous how?”

  “He’s a guy who wants something so bad he can taste it, and he’ll tear up anything between him and it.”

  “And what does he want so badly?”

  “Oh, the same thing everyone wants: more money, more power. He works on the fifteenth floor and wants to work on the nineteenth. He lives in Agoura Hills and wants to live in Malibu. That kind of thing.”

  “Those floors and towns don’t mean anything to me,” I said. Of course, I gathered that the top brass worked on the nineteenth floor and people who wanted to be top brass were on the fifteenth. I knew what Malibu was. I’d have to look up Agoura Hills.

  “Put it this way,” Brandon said. “Walters just turned fifty. In advertising years, he’s a hundred and sixty-seven. The guy’s like Fu Manchu hatching fiendish plots to take over the company before his expiration date.”

  “What happens when you expire in advertising?”

  “You spend the rest of your life as a mid-level executive in an office with a window overlooki
ng a parking lot and a doorway with a view of smirking shits who get promoted over you because they know how to use urban slang to sell cleaning supplies.”

  “Are you telling me my paper towels aren’t the shiznit?”

  Brandon groaned. “What does Walters want with you anyway?”

  “He says he wants to give money to the hospital.”

  “No one gives money for free. What’s Walters trying to buy with his donation?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he’s just rich and generous.”

  “He’s neither. The fucker tips fifteen percent and he isn’t half as rich as he looks. He’s got a lot of money; don’t get me wrong. He probably made more this month than you would in a year at your stupid little hippie commune but he doesn’t have big money to give you. Not run-a-hospital money. Though I guess he does have bribe-a-grant-writer money. And he definitely has put-a-grant-writer-in-the-hospital-if-he-doesn’t-do-what-he’s-told money.”

  “Thanks for the heads up.” I took a second to process this last comment because in the world of my little desk in the maze of the Williams Building, with a window overlooking a dual diagnosis ward, advertisers who hired thugs didn’t seem to fit. I asked, “Does a guy who works in advertising really have access to hired muscle?”

  “Strange things happen north of the fourteenth floor. And a dude like Walters has no sense of humor. Oh, which reminds me.” Brandon suddenly sounded animated. It was the first time in our conversation when his voice triggered those memories of our original friendship a decade and a half ago. “I have to tell you this. I was at an awards thing one time. An industry function, and I ended up standing next to Walters at the bar. I was all liquored up and knew I shouldn’t do it, but in my booze-addled mind, I’m like, when am I gonna get this opportunity again? And I was curious. So I just asked Walters.” Brandon paused.

  I didn’t want to bite, but I bit. “What did you ask him?”

  “‘How do blind people know when they’re done wiping their ass?’ And you know what he said?”

  I blurted, “When the toilet paper doesn’t stink anymore?” I didn’t want to say that. I didn’t want to get sucked back into the early-20s Land of Dude that seemed to surround old friends like Brandon. I wanted to take higher ground. I just couldn’t resist.

  “Nah,” Brandon said. “It’s one of those jokes that’s funnier without a punch line.”

  A short silence lingered between us. I didn’t see any real need to rescue the conversation from the silence. I said, “Listen, I gotta go. I appreciate the info.”

  “No sweat,” Brandon said. “And I know you’re not asking for my advice but I’ll give it anyway. Cancel your lunch with that fucking guy. No good can come from this.”

  “I may do that,” I said, knowing I wouldn’t cancel that lunch. Because here it was, a voice in my head for the fourth time. It insisted I act against my nature and my better judgment. The same thing that held me here instead of going to Fresno on Nietzsche’s last day, the same thing that kept me from reading the release form I signed for Dr. Bishop. It was a little creepy how insistent it was, how strangely directed. Maybe something was slipping inside. I had to be aware of that possibility. It wasn’t enough to keep me from lunch with Frank Walters, though.

  Brandon said, “Keep in touch.”

  “You got it.” I pulled my appointment book closer. I underlined the words Be careful.

  8

  Frank Walters had asked to meet at a chain restaurant, the kind of place you could find lingering on the edge of most American suburbs and dotting Southern California freeways every twenty miles. Our meeting was scheduled for one o’clock. This had put me in a bit of a pickle. Due to the bus schedule and time allotted for walking to the big box shopping center and across its vast parking lot, I had a choice of either arriving for our lunch meeting fifteen minutes early or fifteen minutes late. I erred on the early side.

  A hostess sat me at a four-top round table. On the wall above me hung one toy tricycle too small for any rider with the exception of an organ grinder’s monkey, one railroad crossing sign, one candy-striped clown horn, one autographed picture of Mets legend Ron Swoboda making a diving catch in the 1969 World Series, one stuffed owl, and six black-faced Russian nesting dolls on a tiny shelf. A toy airplane hung from a rafter above my head, supported by fishing line. An absconded carousel horse stood at the end of the hallway, its nose pointing to the bathrooms. I tried to think of a story that encompassed all of these items, or some sort of theme that could tie together clown horns and nesting dolls and railroad signs but came up with nothing.

  In front of me lay my white, three-ring binder with all of my grant information. I couldn’t concentrate on it or anything else in the clutter of surrounding kitsch. I closed my eyes and tried to think of something more peaceful: the cemetery park by my house, Clint Dempsey chasing a tennis ball, the soft flesh of my wife’s earlobes, Lola’s wall of college art. It calmed me long enough to open my eyes again. My gaze rested on a sign across the room from me. It showed a clip-art man from the ’40s. He had a huge head, a tiny body, and a cane that must’ve been for decoration judging from the way he held it. Below the clip-art man, the sign read Hats Cleaned, 6¢. Clearly, the interior designer of this restaurant was afflicted with that random madness brought on by a complete lack of imagination. I could make no other sense of it.

  Luckily, the waitress snapped me out of it. She approached my table from behind me and said, “Hey, you. I’m glad you stopped by.”

  I looked up at her. Nothing about her eyes struck me as familiar. I wondered if she knew me from the psych hospital, or if the tone of her voice was affected, claiming to know me in an accepted insincerity, much in the way that this particular big box restaurant claimed to be “Your Neighborhood Restaurant” though it was in hundreds of locations throughout the US, none of which could accurately be called a “neighborhood.” I gave the waitress my best noncommittal smile.

  “What can I get you to drink?” she asked. She set a cardboard coaster that doubled as a beer advertisement on the table in front of me. Her fingernails were painted black.

  “An iced tea, please.”

  “Mango or passion fruit?”

  This question struck me as nonsensical as the decorations. It took me half a second to understand that mango and passion fruit were my choices of iced tea. I didn’t know how to choose one. I said, “Whichever one you recommend.”

  The waitress smiled. “Passion fruit.” She winked and walked away. I watched her pale legs swish as she left, her saddle shoes and frilly white socks a blur on the dark, matted carpet.

  I’d brought my three-ring binder with me to the restaurant for two reasons: it gave me something to read on the bus and it served as a reminder that the funding for the hospital was going well. I was negotiating with both a pharmaceutical company and our research scientists about a large endowment to drive their Alzheimer’s research. A psychologist turned legislator had set aside a good deal of money from last year’s state budget to cover hospitals like ours, and early conversations with various members of the Department of Mental Health led me to believe that a lot of that money would be heading our way. I had irons in several promising fires. The indicators I could read all pointed to the notion that I was doing a good job so far and that the hospital didn’t necessarily need money from Frank Walters of Dickinson and Associates.

  I flipped the pages, re-read my own notes, kept my eyes down. A blur crept into my peripheral vision, white trails from a waving cane. I looked up to see Frank Walters. He paused at my table, pulled out a seat, folded his overcoat the long way and the short way and hung it over the back of the seat next to him, unbuttoned his jacket, and sat down without a word. He retracted the length of his cane into its handle.

  I said, “Mr. Walters.”

  He offered his right hand. I shook it. I wondered how he knew how to find my table, how he’d gotten to the restaurant, all of those things. He moved with such ease and confidence that, for one sham
eful second, I wondered if he truly was blind. What a perfect coup for someone in his business: to soften the barbs associated with being an advertising guy by faking blindness. A nice dose of pity to dilute the contempt. If it was his personal campaign to advertise himself, it would be an effective one. I’d buy it. As soon as I finished wondering this about Walters, I felt like a jerk for even thinking it.

  Walters adjusted his tie. Everything about him was immaculate: pressed silk shirt, matching handkerchief in his front pocket, suit jacket tailored to fit, manicured fingernails, hair so sculpted by product that a Santa Ana wind couldn’t muss it. His sharpness was intimidating. I’d even dressed up a little for this lunch. I wore my best dress shirt, tie, and slacks. It was the outfit I wore for job interviews, the suit my mother had bought so that I wouldn’t embarrass her at formal family functions. Only minus the jacket. I’d left that at home. Of course I recognized the irony of getting dressed up to meet a blind man.