“I understand,” I said.
Another unpleasant situation narrowly averted. The waitress brought Dr. Benengeli the glass of wine. She took a sip. I leaned back in my chair. The procession of shoppers and cruisers in front of me started to thin. Most of the downtown shops closed around seven o’clock, and most of the shoppers cleared out about half an hour before that. I turned my glance to Dr. Benengeli, now sitting back in her chair, her starry oxfords swinging a couple of inches above the ground. Outside her work clothes, she looked several years younger. She looked, in fact, right around my age. Realizing this made a lot of the pieces of the Dr. Benengeli puzzle fit together more. Her references to Duran Duran cassette tapes and bikes with banana seats and top-loader VCRs and her brother’s parachute pants and playing Coleco Electronic Quarterback in the backseat of her parents’ Ford Galaxie while they waited in line to get gas at Tenneco all matched up nicely with the group memories of my generation. I suddenly saw Dr. Benengeli as a more complete person.
She said, “Now, I know you didn’t invite me here to talk about what we should call secretaries. So let’s get down to the point.”
“Okay.” I nodded, more to something in my mind than to something outside of it. “I’m curious about Dr. Bishop’s research. Can you give me the straight dope?”
Dr. Benengeli raised her wine glass and pointed at me with her pinkie. “I’ll tell you this: it’s a good thing she’s already in a psych institution.”
“Why’s that?”
“’Cause what she’s doing is a little crazy.”
“Okay?”
Dr. Benengeli took a sip. “Do you know what it’s about?”
“Pets and pet owners, right?”
“Yeah. But there’s more to it. See, Francine…”
“Who?”
“Dr. Bishop. Francine Bishop. She believes something different about the collective unconscious. When Jung discussed the collective unconscious, he wrote about it as if it were inherent in all of us when we’re born. Think of it like a genetic trait, like eye color or male pattern baldness. One of your genetic traits is your personality. It holds your instincts, your deepest beliefs, your spirituality, your cultural heritage, everything. It’s the core of who you are, but it’s buried. Jung believed that the key to psychoanalysis should be to get the patient in touch with this core. The collective unconscious.”
“Okay.”
“That does sound right, doesn’t it? I haven’t studied Jung in fifteen years. I’m not a Jungian therapist. It’s mostly Cognitive Behavioral for me.”
“I see.”
“So that’s what the collective unconscious is, in a very brief, laymen’s way. Okay? But Francine has a different idea. She asks the question: what if the collective unconscious isn’t within us all? What if it’s not at the core of our minds, but instead it’s something outside of our minds? What if these ideas float around us in the ether, and we get our cultural messages, our beliefs, our spirituality from this floating ether?”
The waitress stepped into this pause. She handed me the three grilled vegetable sandwiches. They were each in their own styrofoam container. The containers were in a white plastic bag. I ordered another beer. Dr. Benengeli ordered another wine. I tied a knot out of the handles of the plastic bag and tucked it under my seat.
Dr. Benengeli picked up her lecture. “So that’s the first distinction, right? For Francine, our shared unconscious is external, floating around us like radio waves or cell phone reception. All we have to do is dial it in.”
“Okay,” I said. Though I wasn’t sure whether it was okay or not.
Dr. Benengeli asked, “Have you heard of the hundredth monkey effect?”
“I think so.” A book with that title kept popping up at the community space in Fresno. “Is that the one with the monkeys on two islands and it had something to do with peace?”
“You got it. Researchers would show the monkeys on one island how to open clams with a rock, or something like that, and usually right around the time the hundredth monkey on that island learned how to open the clam, the first monkey on the other island would figure it out without the help of researchers. So they hypothesized that certain learned behaviors within one society can somehow be spread to other societies through some unspoken communication.”
“Okay. That sounds familiar.”
“So Francine is working off this premise: that you can somehow place notions into the collective unconscious and other people can learn from them. She’s starting with animals, seeing if we send unconscious messages to them and they receive them. That’s what the monitoring of pets is all about. She thinks that we send a message to our pets that we’re heading home, the pets receive that message, and they wait for us at our front doors. And if she can prove that this phenomena does occur, then she can move forward and see how we place those messages, how we receive them, and how we can control them.”
“And you think it’s all a crock?”
Dr. Benengeli nodded. “It’s like the telegram.”
“What?”
“Like the telegram. Maybe telegrams do still exist. Maybe we can still send them. But who cares? Why the hell would you want to send a telegram?”
“Okay.” We’d already had this discussion. More people need to communicate face-to-face.
“Francine is trying to get you to fund this madness, isn’t she?”
“Not at all.”
“Does this have anything to do with Frank Walters?”
“Who?”
“The blind guy I caught in the Williams Building. He gave you his card.”
“I thought he was a patient. Is he a researcher, too?”
Dr. Benengeli shook her head. “Hardly. Why are you curious about all of this?”
“She was filming my foyer for a while to see if my dog reacted to me coming home.”
Dr. Benengeli tilted her wine glass, pointing the rim at me. “Ah. The stolen dog.” She emptied the last of her wine.
“Poor little guy,” I said, my guard slipping down. “Breaks my heart.”
She raised her eyebrows. “You miss him, huh?”
I saw what was going on here. I was not about to get trapped into any Rogerian reflective listening. I just smiled and shook my head.
The waitress came back with the second round and cleared away our empties. I sipped my beer. It seemed to go straight to my head. It also reminded me of the food I’d ordered. I turned to the table next to me. Sitting alone was a kid who looked about 13 years old. His mother had gone to the bathroom and his father was at the bar, talking to a friend. The kid played a handheld video game. I reached over and tapped him on the shoulder. He paused his game and glanced up.
I grabbed the takeout bag from under my chair and set it on the table. “You see those three kids in that storefront doorway across the street?” I asked the kid at the next table.
“Yeah,” he said. His thumbs hovered over the controls of his game.
“I’ll give you five bucks if you bring this food over to them.”
The kid looked at the bag, looked at his game, looked around inside the restaurant. “That’s all that’s in the bag? Just food?”
I untied the knot and opened the bag. He reached inside, took out a styrofoam container, opened it, picked out a fry, ate it, and closed the container. “Five bucks?”
“Payable when you get back.”
The kid stuffed his videogame in his pocket. “Deal.” He swept up the food and set to jaywalking.
“How generous of you,” Dr. Benengeli said.
I plucked a picture of Lincoln on US mint paper from my wallet and set it on the table. “I suddenly have more money than I’ve ever earned in my life and no wife to spend it all.”
Dr. Benengeli swung her chair around. She leaned forward in her seat, arms crossed, elbows on the glass of the table. The big-eyed doll on her t-shirt stared at me. Through the glass and metal mesh of the tabletop, I could see Dr. Benengeli’s oxfords flat on the ground. Her dark eye
s locked on mine. “Are you sure you don’t want to talk about the divorce?”
I groaned.
15
A week later, I sat alone in Eric’s office in a more or less abandoned building in the more or less abandoned north quad. I’d spent almost all of my non-work hours since meeting with Dr. Benengeli volunteering for Dr. Bishop’s study. I’d worked on it enough to gain Eric and Dr. Bishop’s trust. I’d worked enough to get my own keys to this barren little office. Now it was time for me to do what I had to do for Clint Dempsey.
I’d purchased a small memory stick. Eric’s computer transferred the bulk of the data from Dr. Bishop’s experiments onto the memory stick. I also had photocopies of Eric’s notes spread out in front of me. Eric had used a simple system of symbols to indicate different actions: an asterisk for the days when the pets reacted more than ten minutes prior to their master’s return, a yen symbol for when the pets reacted less than three minutes prior to their master’s return (because, ostensibly this would suggest that the pet might not be responding to unconscious messages but rather to something physical, like the sound of the master’s car approaching), a cent symbol for when the pets reacted between three and ten minutes prior to their master’s return, and an infinity symbol when the pet didn’t react at all. The symbols didn’t seem to have any inherent meaning. As far as I could tell, Eric had chosen these particular symbols because his handwriting was sloppy and each of these symbols was easy to distinguish. In the corner of the first page, I drew this legend:
∞ — pet reacts more than ten minutes prior to return
¥ — pet reacts between three and ten minutes prior to return
* — pet reacts less than three minutes prior to return
¢ — pet does not react
After drawing the legend, I went to work with white correction fluid, blocking out symbols randomly. I used the correction fluid sparingly, changing no more than seven symbols per page. When I got through all forty-eight pages, I drew stars over each blotted out symbol. The star was the only symbol I could convincingly write in Eric’s handwriting.
Dr. Bishop knocked on the door while I was drawing seven stars on my 31st sheet of photocopied notes. I stacked my photocopies and slid them into my briefcase. The entire contents of my briefcase now added up to: forty-eight sheets of photocopied and falsified notes. I set my briefcase at my feet. “Come on in.”
Dr. Bishop poked her head in the door. “Working on a Sunday?”
“I don’t want to volunteer for you on the hospital’s dime,” I said.
“See, I could tell you were an honest man,” Dr. Bishop said. “I could hear it in your voice when you interviewed for this job. That’s why I hired you.”
I smiled. I wondered if that smile seemed sincere. Could I fake sincerity with a psychologist, a researcher, someone so in tune with human behavior? I also wondered, not for the first time, if Dr. Bishop remembered me from our first encounter way back when, long before these psych hospital days. A printout of data sat on Eric’s metal desk. I picked up the printout. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the little light at the end of my memory stick, glowing like a beacon to my honest man’s theft of Dr. Bishop’s information. If I accidentally tapped the mouse or any key on the computer, the screen saver would go away and Dr. Bishop would be able to see the dialogue box that tracked the progress of the file transfer from Eric’s computer to my memory stick. I handed the printout to Dr. Bishop. She sat in the other office chair and slid on her reading glasses.
“Numbers look pretty good,” I said.
Dr. Bishop’s eyes darted back and forth as she skimmed the page. She nodded but didn’t smile. “What’s the bottom line?”
I didn’t need to look at the sheet. The final numbers stuck in my head. I said, “The pets almost always reacted. I don’t remember the exact percentage, but it was less than two percent of the time that the pets didn’t react at all. About nine percent of the time, the pets reacted to their master’s return within three minutes of the return…”
“Together, that’s almost ten percent of the time.” Dr. Bishop shook her head.
“A little over ten percent. Yeah. On the other hand, about seventy percent of the time… A little less than seventy percent. Sixty-eight point something percent of the time, the pets reacted more than ten minutes prior to the master’s return. That’s a pretty high return rate.”
“It’s pretty high. True. But is it a phenomenon?”
I shrugged. “Who can say? There are so many variables. Maybe the pets reacted because their masters came home at the same time every day, give or take ten minutes. Maybe they reacted because they heard the car rumbling down the street, and it took the masters five or ten minutes to park, put the club on the steering wheel, lock the doors, get out of the car, balance the groceries, get to the front door, fiddle with the keys, and so on. Maybe pets didn’t react on certain days because they were mad at their masters. Who knows? It’s so hard to isolate anything in this experiment.”
Dr. Bishop took off her reading glasses. She opened her glasses case and took a swatch of silk cloth from it. Her fingers—long, thin, cracked and spotted with age but manicured to suggest an earlier, more fashionable time—rubbed the silk swatch against the lenses of her reading glasses. “It won’t stand up to peer review, that’s for sure.”
I felt suddenly bad about being the one to point this out to her. I looked down at the floor, by the tower of the computer. My memory stick stuck out, the light a beaming tattletale. I pushed the power button on the computer’s monitor. The monitor shut down, but not the computer. “Still,” I said. “Seventy percent is pretty compelling. Almost ninety percent, really, if you count everything beyond three minutes. That’s something.”
Dr. Bishop wrapped her reading glasses in the swatch of silk and replaced them in their case. She handed back the sheet of data. “Did you run the numbers or did Eric?”
“I did.”
“Off Eric’s notes?”
I nodded.
“Not easy to read his handwriting, is it?”
“Not at all.”
Dr. Bishop stood from the office chair. She brushed her cotton slacks and adjusted her coat. She placed her thin fingers on my shoulder. “Come get a cup of coffee,” she said. “I need to talk this out.”
I rolled the numbers of the combination lock on my briefcase and set it in front of the memory stick. If Eric came to the office while I was gone, he’d know that I was saving my own personal backup of this information. It would not be a good scene. I couldn’t think of an excuse to get me out of coffee with Dr. Bishop. I’ve never been too good of a liar. Lying to a shrink seemed even tougher. I figured it was best to try to forget about the memory stick and take my chances with coffee.
Dr. Bishop and I left the more or less abandoned building and headed toward the campus lot where she parked her car. Between the two, we passed a little café on the edge of campus. The café accepted both money and vouchers earned by the long-term patients for doing chores around the living units. In a way, it was a little oasis of equality, where no one made the distinction between staff and patient, the keyholders and the keyless. We would all duck in for a quick rubbery hamburger with fries that contained more oil than potato. A lot of the staff, particularly the janitorial staff and the interns, kept cheap, beat-up bicycles on campus so they could go quickly from their offices to the places where they needed to work. No one locked the bikes and, for most of the staff, the origin of the bikes was a bit of a mystery. Eric had explained that several of the bikes had been abandoned during the mass exodus from Winfield University. Others had been donated by a psych tech who salvaged junk parts and reassembled them into working bikes as a hobby. Since no one technically owned the bikes, no one locked them or worried too much about theft. The only difficulties came when workers rode bikes across campus, did their work, and came back to find the bikes gone. It would be a drag, but nothing that couldn’t be solved by a long walk. The bikes, it seemed, nev
er left campus.
As Dr. Bishop and I passed the café, a middle-aged man with long flowing bangs that, with more care, could be used to craft a comb-over rode one of the bikes in big, slow loops. He had a round head and a grin like a jack-o-lantern. His loops were occasionally punctuated with a “Woo-hooo!” The man wore pajama bottoms, a stretched out V-neck t-shirt, and flip-flops. He was clearly among the keyless.
Another young man jogged behind the slow loops. He wore a blue button-up shirt tucked into khaki pants. His loafers flapped on the pavement. His keys jingled. Almost to the rhythm, almost as if it were a song, the young man said, “Come on, Danny. Give me my bike, Danny.” Over and over.
Danny kept up his slow loops, bangs fluttering in the wind, up to and probably long after the time Dr. Bishop and I had gotten into her car and exited the campus.
To her credit, Dr. Bishop did not take us to Starbucks. She drove into the foothills north of the psych hospital and stopped at a coffee shop in the downtown area of the little artists’ community there. The coffee shop made a big deal out of using beans grown in Hawaii and having fair trade everything. Even the girl behind the counter, with her white-girl dreadlocks and her sleeve tattoos and her pierced eyebrow and nose and lip wore a shirt with the words “fair trade” stretched across her breast. I lingered a second on all the possibilities and contexts available for interpreting the words “fair trade” stretched across a young woman’s breast. Luckily, my glance had drifted up to the menu above the counter while I spaced out, only my mind’s eye ogled the “fair trade” boobs. The young woman asked for our order. I got an iced tea. Dr. Bishop ordered a coffee, paid for both, and even tipped generously. We took a table on the patio.
The patio of the coffee shop was enclosed. A short metal fence almost completely swallowed by shrubs surrounded the patio. This ensured that the only people-watching would be done with people inside the patio. As for this Sunday afternoon, the patrons included Dr. Bishop, me, and one homeless woman counting her change on a wooden picnic table. Dr. Bishop said, “So this experiment proves nothing.”
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