Madhouse Fog

by Sean Carswell

  Walters said, “I’m sure you’re wondering why I invited you to lunch.”

  “I am.”

  “My firm is willing to make quite a generous donation to your mental hospital.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  “We understand that some of your scientists are engaged in very compelling research. We are willing to completely fund one of these scientists.”

  I tried to see the angle in this. The first research scientists I thought of at the facility were the Alzheimer’s biologists. Why would an advertising firm be interested in Alzheimer’s research?

  I said, “That’s very generous of you.”

  “And would you like to know why we are willing to make such a generous donation?”

  The waitress returned with my iced tea. She leaned over the table to set it down, her left shoulder close to my nose. I caught a whiff of some kind of laboratory chocolate body wash. It sparked something deep in my unconscious. A rush of excitement. Expectation. I took another deep breath, barely looking at the waitress. She took Walters’ drink order and vanished again.

  I gathered my wits. “It’s not my place to ask,” I said. “By its very nature, a donation has no strings attached to it. It’s a gift with no implied return. That’s what ‘donation’ means. Donations with implied returns are called ‘payments.’ If you want to pay the hospital for something, you took the wrong guy out to lunch.”

  Walters laughed out twin guffaws. His voice was deep. His smile seemed sincere. His eyes, hidden behind the smoky dark glasses, gave no hints. He wagged his finger in my general direction, though the actual point of his finger was directed over my left shoulder. “You’re not new at this game. I appreciate that.”

  Perhaps this was meant as a compliment, but it struck me as condescending. I shrugged it off.

  “How did you come to work at the mental hospital?” he asked.

  I decided it was best not to tell Walters anything that wasn’t readily obvious. I left out all the bits about my wife finding work down here, pressuring me to leave Fresno and find a better-paying job, my job search which landed me at the psych hospital, my wife balking about the move, Nietzsche’s health being at the point where we were afraid to move him, my wife’s job falling through, and so on. The whole tangled mess was none of his business. As my personal drama continued to unfold in my mind, it seemed unreal. I avoided talking and even thinking about it as much as I could. I said to Walters, “Psych hospitals like this one are becoming a thing of the past. I’d like to help turn that trend around.”

  “Tell me about it. A place like yours saved my mother’s life.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s true. I know electroshock therapy gets a bad rap, especially around people who don’t know anything about it. But when I was a child, my mother was haunted. I don’t know what it was, but I know she wasn’t able to let it go. Something had a hold on her and made her life miserable. She went away to a facility for several months. She underwent a series of electroshock treatments, and when she came back home, whatever had haunted her was gone. Or at least held at bay. Either way, her transformation was amazing. I owe a great deal to these hospitals.”

  “When was this?”

  “A long time ago. I was just a kid.”

  “So when are we talking about? Late ’60s? Early ’70s?”

  “Try early ’60s.” Walters reached out to the table in front of him. He grabbed his silverware and unwrapped it from its paper napkin cocoon. He set the fork and spoon to the left of where his plate would sit, and his knife to the right. He set the napkin on his lap. “It’s still in use, though. Electroshock therapy.”

  “Oh, I know,” I said, though I wasn’t at all certain he was telling the truth.

  “And a damn good thing it is. You can’t let public opinion drive your science.”

  “That’s true.” Apparently, I was agreeing with anything this guy said.

  The waitress returned in her subtle cloud of laboratory chocolate. The unconscious jolt hit me again. Walters said to her, “Can you tell me what the woman at the table behind me is having? It smells wonderful.”

  The waitress glanced over at the table to her right. I took a good look at her face, the Jayne Mansfield white hair, the black bangs, her thin, pale neck stretching from the collar of her uniform shirt. Conscious memory overtook my déjà vu. I knew who this woman was. I’d seen her white skirt flutter in the Santa Ana winds that blew through the laundromat. No wonder these jolts shot through my brain. She said to Walters, “The jambalaya?”

  “The Me Oh My-a Jumbo-laya?” Walters said. “I’d like that.”

  I wondered for a second how Walters knew the actual name that the menu gave for that dish. The menus were not in Braille. The woman behind us had ordered before Walters arrived.

  The waitress turned to me. “And what can I get for you?”

  “A burger and any side that’s not fried and doesn’t have mayonnaise on it.”

  “Fruit cup?”

  “That’s okay with me,” I said.

  “You don’t want the Cheese Please Burger?” Walters said, seemingly trying to up-sell me, though it was understood that he’d be paying the bill.

  “Cheese and a hamburger is an unholy union,” I said, although I’m not Jewish and don’t have dietary restrictions designating the separation of dairy from meat. I just don’t like cheeseburgers.

  The waitress smiled and fluttered off, her barbed wire tattoo buried under a frilly white sock.

  I said to Walters, “I imagine you must know a lot about psychology, what with the business you’re in.”

  Walters shook his head. “Not much,” he said. “I know about operant conditioning. It’s one of the basic principles of advertising. I know quite a bit about behavioral psychology. Ever since John Watson defected to Madison Avenue in the ’20s, behavioralists have overrun the industry. I know that there’s something psychological about restaurants like this applying musical names to their food that makes it sound better than it will likely taste. But that’s not much psychology.”

  “Still, you’re interested?”

  “More on a personal level than a professional one. Advertising today isn’t quite as psychological. It has more to do with demographics. Watch this.” The waitress clomped by in her saddle shoes. Perhaps hearing the clomps, he waved her over. She paused at our table. He said, “Excuse me, Miss. Would you mind telling me your zip code?”

  The waitress glanced around the nearby tables. Everything seemed in order. She didn’t seem to be in a particular hurry. She said, “93003.”

  “Midtown?” he said.

  She nodded.

  He likely didn’t need affirmation and couldn’t see the nod, regardless. He said, “Tell me how many of these things are correct. You like cashmere sweaters, but only purchase them when they’re on sale. You’re registered at Sephora and when they send you a birthday coupon, you redeem it and buy expensive bottles of shampoo and body wash. You’re not interested in tires and tend to buy whatever is on sale at the local Firestone. You don’t eat much fast food but you can’t resist the occasional Crispy Chicken Caesar Wrap at Wendy’s. You dye your hair and occasionally like to mix in fun colors. You really like the looks of those new Mini Coopers and you’re considering purchasing one. You own two pairs of Uggs. Both are factory seconds purchased at an outlet. You rarely purchase books. You only purchase music online, and you do that one song at a time. You have never voted in a special election. You don’t use public transportation. You have a bicycle, but the tires are flat and you don’t have a bike pump. You own the complete box set of Sex & the City and think the main character made a huge mistake when she broke up with the furniture maker. Am I close?”

  “Wow,” the waitress said. “That’s pretty good.” She looked at me and raised her eyebrows, then went back to work.

  “Demographics, not psychology,” Walters said.

  Bizarre was more like it. Everything he said was a spot-on description of my
wife, with the exception of the Wendy’s wrap. My wife never ate at Wendy’s though she did work at their corporate offices in Fresno. I wondered what was behind this little parlor trick he’d pulled, and how much of his description of my wife’s purchasing habits was a coincidence. If I were to believe in metaphysics, or at least in Eric from Roads and Grounds, there are no coincidences.

  Perhaps not coincidentally, at this exact moment the servers started clapping and singing a birthday song that was not “Happy Birthday” and therefore did not owe royalties to the artist who wrote “Happy Birthday.” One of them carried a mound of chocolate and cream and high fructose corn syrup with a candle on top. They gathered around a corner booth near the window with the neon Blue Moon sign. An overweight woman in a flowered polyester blouse yelped and gushed, “I can’t believe you guys.”

  Her friends—all similarly large women with similar polyester blouses—laughed and goaded the birthday girl. The servers continued to sing with bright smiles stuck on their faces. Suddenly, the madness of this big box restaurant made a little more sense. It was all a blend of performance and willful ignorance: the birthday girl acting like she was genuinely surprised when she likely came to this restaurant specifically for this song and dessert, her friends acting as if this were all spontaneous and not a repeat of previous birthday episodes, the servers trying to mask their humiliation with big smiles and an off-key song. Even the beer sign, Blue Moon, advertised one of those beers sold as a microbrew despite the fact it was made by a huge multinational corporation that owned half of Colorado.

  The biggest performance, though, was enacted by me in my silly shirt and tie and slacks, acting as if I were anything but an aging punk rocker trying to find a way to keep his soul intact while making a living, as if I wasn’t a failure of a husband who gave up my second greatest passion to save my marriage. I wondered how much of this Walters could see, blind or not.

  The servers finished their song. The birthday girl blew out her candle. About half of the diners in the half-full restaurant applauded. Walters applauded. I did, too.

  I didn’t say anything about my little epiphany. I kept it to myself and let Walters talk and eat. I assumed that his more or less idle chatter was better than me giving away anything I didn’t want to give away. After Walters had polished off his Me Oh My-a Jumbo-laya and I finished my No Cheese Please Burger and fruit cup (without a cute name), Walters selected among the three credit cards in his wallet and handed one to the waitress. He then got back to the point.

  “I know that you’re not a man for subtleties, so I’ll just say it. I’m personally interested in the research that Dr. Bishop is doing. Extremely interested. I’m in control of some discretionary funds at Dickinson and Associates, and I’m willing to use those funds to cover the complete expenditures of her experiments and make sure she has the necessary means to continue her work.”

  This seemed the most random thing he’d said. I couldn’t imagine why a man like Walters would want to fund a batty old doctor investigating telepathy in dogs. I didn’t ask him why he was interested. I just said, “That’s very generous of you.”

  “In exchange, I’d need access to any and all paperwork accompanying these experiments. And this is important: only I get access to her information.” He pointed at his chest with his thumb to emphasize the “I.” “No one else in my organization does.”

  “I’ll pass your offer on to Dr. Bishop.”

  Walters reached across the table and grabbed my hand. The arm of his tailored suit rested less than a quarter-inch from a clump of rice and tomato sauce that had fallen off his bowl of Me Oh My-a Jumbo-laya. “Make no mistake. Though we both represent larger agencies, this offer is between you and me. Exclusively between you and me.”

  I gently slid my hand from underneath his. “I’ll think about it,” I said.

  The waitress came back with the credit card slip and a pen for Walters. He asked her what the total had been. She read the number off the credit card slip. He said, “Can you put your finger by the lines where I add the tip and total?”

  She did.

  He set his finger on top of hers, softly enough for her to slide her hand out from underneath. He then added the fifteen-percent tip and total. As I watched him do this, the waitress handed me a slip of white, glossy cash-register paper. I unfolded it. Inside, in bubbly handwriting, were her phone number and her name. I smiled a false and inappropriate smile. I raised my left hand up to my chin and tickled my wedding ring with my left thumb, hoping she would get the hint. She just smiled and fluttered away.

  I looked back to Walters. He pulled a thick, booklet-sized yellow envelope out of his pocket. The envelope was sealed. It had no names or markings of any kind. The paper was thick enough to prevent postal carriers or nosy roommates from peeking inside. He set it on the table in front of himself. He drummed his manicured fingers on it. “Look, I understand the situation from your perspective. You’re an idealist. You spent your twenties trying to save the world. You spent even longer than that, right? You worked for that nonprofit well into your thirties. A guy with your particular skill set, you could’ve made a lot of money during that time. You wouldn’t have to live in an apartment and ride the bus around town. You could own a home by now, your own car. And, I don’t mean to presume, but maybe that extra bit of money you could’ve been making would make things smoother between you and your wife.”

  I stared at Walters, happy at this moment that he couldn’t see the surprise on my face. So he knew everything. Just like me, he’d done his research prior to this meeting. I said nothing. A few seconds ticked off the clock. Walters let the empty time pass. He drummed the envelope in front of him. “I hope I don’t offend you,” he finally said. “I don’t mean to bring your wife into this.”

  Though, of course he did mean to do just that. He wanted me to know how much he knew about me. He wanted me to use my imagination to fill in the blanks left by his little hints. I waited for him to make his point.

  “Like I said, I understand somewhat where you’re coming from. You’re reaching that point in your life when you realize that the world can’t be saved. You know now that idealism has its place, but a time comes when realism takes over. It becomes time to move on. It becomes time to start making the world better for yourself and for your wife. Maybe it’s time to settle into a comfortable life and have kids. Again, I don’t want to presume. I’m just letting you know that, if you work with me on this, you will reap financial rewards.” His manicured fingernails slid the envelope across the table. I did not pick it up.

  “Of course, you’ll keep thinking about this,” Walters said. “You’ll wonder what I might want with Dr. Bishop’s research. Perhaps you’ll make some presumptions of your own. You’ll imagine sinister intentions. Understand that there’s nothing sinister here. I’m just a guy trying to get a jump on a discovery that I think I can make a buck on. You’re in a position to profit off it, too. That’s it.”

  I said nothing in response. I didn’t take my eyes off his smoky dark glasses. I couldn’t let all the effluvia of this big box restaurant distract me. I couldn’t watch that waitress’s pale legs flutter by another time. I was too busy wondering whether or not I was being careful. And what the hell could this have to do with dogs knowing when their masters came home?

  Walters didn’t wait for a response from me. He said, “There’s one more thing I want you to keep in mind. It is this: I am a very powerful man.”

  I took a second to wonder how powerful. If he were genuinely big time, he wouldn’t be in this big box restaurant eating with me. Someone with real wealth would’ve sent a car to pick me up and would’ve taken me to a much nicer restaurant. He would have dazzled me with his wealth. He wouldn’t have had to tell me he was a very powerful man. He would have showed me. Or he would’ve sent a henchman to meet with me. So, at best, Walters was the henchman to a powerful man. Brandon had said Walters was only rich enough to bribe me or pay someone to put me in a hospital. And, well,
there was a power in that I couldn’t ignore. I didn’t know who to believe or how to figure out what to believe. I asked Walters, “What does that mean?”

  “It means, if you say no to me, you’re saying no to an extremely powerful man.”

  “Okay,” I said. Or maybe it was, “Okay?”

  Walters stood. He buttoned his jacket, transferred his folded overcoat from the back of the chair to the crook of his arm, and extended his cane. “I’ll keep in touch,” he said. He followed the white sway of his cane out the door.

  In the midst of this big box restaurant, Walters looked as if he were exiting stage left. I took a second to think about this: about his spotless clothes and his awkward way of talking with all those crazy transition words—of course, perhaps, like I said, again, understand. No one talks like that. No one dresses like that. Walters came at me as if he were trying play the role of the bad guy in a movie. He acted as if he were on stage, his costume selected for him, his dialog written by some hack. It raised all kinds of questions in my mind, like, if he’s the actor, who’s the director? Who’s in charge of this performance? Or was this his own vehicle, the play he was writing, directing, and producing himself to catapult himself to the nineteenth floor? And, of course, since I was in a place that blended willful ignorance with performance, I could imagine that I was just being overly suspicious, paranoid.

  I opened the flap of the envelope and peeked inside. A stack of one hundred dollar bills. Enough of them to solve a number of my problems. I didn’t count them. I closed the envelope and stuck it in the front pocket of my pants. I stuffed the waitress’s number next to it. I knew I wasn’t going to call her. I guess I just didn’t want to hurt her feelings by leaving the number there for the bus boy to stack on top of all the other trash.

  I walked out of the big box restaurant, my pockets weighed down by things I didn’t want and didn’t feel right throwing away.