Madhouse Fog

by Sean Carswell

  Clint Dempsey was going nuts in my foyer. I knelt down to pet him. He twisted and squirmed, jumped and licked at my face, too excited to really get a dose of the affection I administered. It was good to have my dog back. Moments like this, I didn’t even feel guilty. So what if I’d traded false information to a bully to save my dog? There were no innocent victims in that scenario.

  I made quick mental plans: get the tennis ball, head to the cemetery park, give Clint Dempsey ample opportunity to chase, capture, and return the ball. Watch the sun hang low over the blue Pacific, trace shadows cast upon the islands on the horizon. Maybe drink a beer to celebrate another day. Relax.

  “That dog has been sitting right there, waiting for you for fifteen minutes.”

  Ape Man stood on the middle of my brown rental carpet, posed like a soldier at ease: feet shoulder width apart, hands clasped behind his back, apparently flexing his chest. He was clean-shaven. This made the Maori tattoo on the left half of his face all the more prominent. Despite that, he looked somehow softer without the beard. He had a weak chin. Pasty white skin and freckles filled in the parts of his face that were unmolested by the blue tattoo ink. The top of his bald head was level with the top of the doorway behind him.

  Frank Walters sat on my couch, a few feet to Ape Man’s left. Once again, he was dressed immaculately: light tan suit, silk shirt such a deep brown that it looked black at first glance, a tie like a shadow on his shirt, a matching silk handkerchief emerging from the front jacket pocket. Not a hair out of place, not a scuff on his shoes. The photocopied notes I’d given him sat on his lap.

  I scooped up Clint Dempsey. He squirmed in my arms. I said, “Come on in, guys. Make yourselves at home.”

  Walters thumbed the notes on his lap. “According to this information you sold us,” he said, “Dr. Bishop’s pets only responded to their owners within three minutes of their owners coming home. That was the case almost ninety percent of the time. Is that right?”

  I stroked Clint Dempsey’s head. “Sounds about right.”

  Walters handed the pages to the Ape Man. He softened his Army pose and rifled through the notes. When he found what he was looking for, he arranged that page on the top of the pile. Walters said, “So let’s review. Connor is holding the page that charts this dog’s reaction to your return. It must be your chart because the starting date is later than all the others and the ending date coincides with the day you signed your divorce papers. And based on this chart, that dog right there never, not once, waited for you by your front door for longer than three minutes. Not once. Is that right, Connor?”

  Ape Man held up the paper. “That’s what the sheet says.” He looked at me for a reaction.

  I said, “Your name is Connor?” This realization filled me with confidence. I felt like I could take him. How tough could he really be with a name like Connor? I pictured a chubby, twelve-year-old version of the Ape Man lumbering off a suburban soccer field, none of the kids talking to him because his slow, fat ass just cost them the game. Only his mother will go near him. She embraces him and says, “It’s okay, Connor. Let’s get a hot fudge sundae at McDonald’s and forget all about it.” That’s what the name Connor made me think of.

  Ape Man said, “Careful, tough guy.”

  “Staying focused here,” Walters said. “We learn that our empirical observations of your dog blatantly contradicts the information you sold to us. What are we going to do now?”

  I stood in my foyer, holding my dog, wondering the same thing, wondering what my next move would be. Hang on to the dog. Do that first.

  Walters extended his white cane. He stood from my couch and held out his hand. Ape Man placed the notes in Walters’ hand. Clint Dempsey squirmed. I hung on and wondered how I would fight and hold onto my dog at the same time. Ape Man took a tennis ball out of his pocket and rolled it into the bedroom behind him. Clint Dempsey launched out of my arms, darted between Ape Man’s legs, and vanished into the bedroom. Ape Man followed. I ran across the floor. Walters stuck his cane out and tripped me. By the time I got back up, my bedroom door was shut and locked. That didn’t stop me. I kicked the door, just to the left of the knob. The cheap cardboard door gave way, splintering, creaking, swinging open. Ape Man held Clint Dempsey in his arms. Clint Dempsey had the ball in his mouth. Ape Man stuck a hypodermic needle into Clint Dempsey’s rump.

  I paused just long enough to watch Ape Man gently place Clint Dempsey on the bed. The pup limped around in one big, slow circle, and then lay down, as if to sleep. Lights out for Clint Dempsey.

  I stared for a second and snapped out of it in the next second. I rushed Ape Man. He pulled a gun out of his bomber jacket. The same pistol he’d threatened me with before, that Sunday on the Pacific Coast Highway. I tackled him anyway and slammed my fists into his head four or five times before he was able to gather up the gun and whack me in the jaw with the butt of it. The whole world—my bedroom, my dog, the Ape Man, his sweaty armpits and his discount department store cologne, Frank Walters, the flash of his white cane, the rumble of the dying American car on the street outside my apartment, the groan erupting from inside me—narrowed down to a flicker of light in a field of black. Then the flicker snuffed out.

  I woke up about twenty minutes later. Bits of dust danced in the slices of sunlight that cut through my window blinds. I lay on the floor and watched them dance for a minute or two. A few brutal facts crossed my mind. First, Clint Dempsey was gone. I lifted my sore head high enough to see that not even the pup’s corpse remained on my bed. As far as I could tell, the scoreboard now read:

  Death 2

  My dogs 0

  Second, I got knocked out by a guy named Connor. The getting knocked out, I could deal with. My assailant was much bigger than me and he was armed. Fair enough. But the fact that his name represented all the weenie kids I’d spent my life trying to help out, befriending just because no one else would… It was too much. Couple that with the fact that the ape who’d grown out the skin of the weenie kid named Connor had killed my dog, and I couldn’t stand it. Either Karma was dead or she just wasn’t paying attention. Third, Frank Walters wasn’t easily fooled.

  I pried myself off the tan rental carpet of my floor. The apartment bore no signs of my visitors, no trace of Clint Dempsey. Nothing but cheap furniture, junk paperbacks, off-white walls, and the detritus of a lonely man’s life. If not for the knot on my jaw and the splintered bedroom door, I could’ve made myself believe that it had all been a dream. That there never had been an Ape Man or a Frank Walters or a Clint Dempsey. That Dr. Bishop wasn’t doing any research. That I was the butterfly dreaming I was a grant writer. Or so I thought at first.

  The knot in my jaw convinced me that the pain, at least, was real and that solid food was out of the question for the night. I walked into the kitchen, took a can of tomato soup out of the cupboard, opened it, dumped the contents into a pot, added water and some spices, and put it on to heat up.

  I spent an eternity watching the pot, waiting for the thick red broth to bubble. I tried to add up what I knew and see where that took me. I knew that Dr. Bishop was doing some kind of experiments, first with pets in their foyers, now with squirrels. I knew that her findings could be exploited in some way and that Walters wanted to exploit them. I couldn’t connect, though, how talking telepathically to dogs—and maybe squirrels, too?—added up to money in advertising. And there was Dr. Benengeli’s explanation, that it was more than telepathy. That it was some kind of fractured collective unconscious that was different from Jung’s, which I didn’t understand well enough to understand the differences. This had led to Dr. Bishop’s optimism, her dream that her experiments could all lead to a higher form of communication. But, again, a higher communication with animals? I didn’t see how that led to Walters. Pile on top of that a weird voice emerging in my head, a blow to my jaw that knocked me unconscious, and a dead dog…

  Which brought me into a new train of thought all about that hypodermic needle in Clint Dempsey’s
rump. It didn’t have to be fatal, did it? The Ape Man surely put my pup to sleep, but he could have put him literally—not euphemistically—to sleep. He could’ve knocked my dog out like he knocked me out. He did, after all, put Clint Dempsey down on the bed very gently. There’d be no reason to do that with a dead dog. And if they were trying to be intimidating, it would make more sense to leave the corpse as a reminder. But there wasn’t a trace of the pup left behind. Thinking of this brought back the image of Clint Dempsey’s sad, slow circle. No, the poor little guy is probably dead.

  When the soup was finally hot, I poured it into a bowl and carried everything over to the kitchen table. I sat down to eat and saw the pictures for the first time.

  There were three of them. The first showed my wife locking the front door of the apartment that we’d once shared and she still lived in. She wore a navy blue business suit and high heels. Her hairstyle had changed since the last time I’d seen her. The second photo showed Lola Diaz seated on a wooden stool in front of a canvas on an easel. The bricks of the dual diagnosis dorm rose behind her. Because of the angle of the photograph, I couldn’t see what was on the canvas. Her tongue stuck out slightly as she dabbed the paintbrush. The third photograph showed Dr. Benengeli and me seated in front of the downtown brewpub. We both gazed off to the street scene. Dr. Benengeli wore her blue t-shirt with the big-eyed doll on front and the oxfords with stars on the toes.

  I ate soup and stared at the photos. Frank Walters meant business.

  18

  The telephone rang through from another world and wrested me from my nap. I was in the middle of a dream in which I was a zombie and all of the living alive, I guess you’d call them, were out to kill me and the other zombies. I’d sought shelter in a college dorm. A girls’ dorm. Another zombie hid with me. He was this kid I’d worked with at the community space in Fresno. A sad, quiet, punk rock boy who’d often complain about not being able to meet any girls, even though I’d introduced him to dozens of girls. In the dream, he complained about being a zombie and that everyone was out to kill him. I empathized. A goth girl came out of her dorm room. Young and beautiful in her dyed black hair and pale skin and eyeliner mask. She went right up to the other zombie, the boy from the community space, and invited him back to her room to listen to Siouxsie and the Banshees records. The saddest smile crept across his face. It was the kind of smile only a zombie in love could make. In the dream, I was thinking I sure hope this works out and he doesn’t eat her brains. At that exact moment, the phone rang. There was no phone in the dream dorm, so I had to undergo the transformation of things. I went from being a grant writer dreaming I was a zombie to a zombie dreaming I was a grant writer. I answered the phone.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Napping,” I said, not quite able to place the woman’s voice on the other end of the line.

  “Napping?! Come on. It’s a beautiful day. Don’t waste it inside.”

  “Where are you?” I asked, because her last dozen words were enough to recognize that it was Lola’s voice on the other end of the line. I thought it strange that she might be calling from the psych hospital.

  “I’m at home. Can I come over?”

  “Yeah. Sure. Of course.”

  “Cool. I’ll be there in a minute.” Lola hung up, leaving me with a world of questions about where she was calling from and how she got my phone number and how she knew where I lived and everything else I wondered about this grown-up version of the second woman I ever loved.

  I had no idea how long it would take her to get over to my place, but I wanted to get a shower in first. I tacked a note on my front door: Lola, come in. I gathered clean clothes so that I could dress in the bathroom, just in case Lola was close and got to my pad before I got out of the shower. I didn’t want an awkward situation of walking out of the bathroom and giving her the full frontal shot.

  I washed quickly, dressed, and by the time I got out of the bathroom, Lola sat in the new armchair I’d picked up a few weeks earlier. She wore a white long-sleeve t-shirt from one of the local surf shops and black warm-up pants, loose at the ankles and with white stripes running down the side of each leg. Everything about her seemed out of context. When I’d seen her at the psych hospital, she always dressed like a woman going to work. I guess, because, in a sense, she was. The updated, 37-year-old Lola, in my mind, was supposed to wear business casual and walk around psych hospitals. Genuine casual and sitting in my new armchair threw me for a quick loop. Her legs were crossed. She wore black and gray striped socks. A bit of an illustration peeked out from the bottom of her pant leg. I said, “What does your sock say?”

  She lifted her pant leg and showed me the illustration: a heart with a dagger through it, wrapped around by a banner. The words in the banner read, “Hardcore Love.” Bright red blood dripped from the dagger.

  “Very cool,” I said.

  Lola smiled.

  I addressed the elephant in the room. “So, you’re out of Oak View?”

  Lola stood. She spread her arms and did a little half-curtsy. “I’m cured.”

  “Congratulations,” I said. “So what now?”

  “Now, we go for a walk.”

  “Give me just a second,” I said. I slid on non-striped, non-illustrated socks and running shoes. My wallet sat on the table by the door. I paused and stared at it for a second. It was a black leather wallet with a wallet chain. My wedding ring was hooked on the clip at the end of the wallet chain. More than sadness or denial, I kept wearing my wedding ring out of habit. Because the ring and the wallet were connected whenever I was inside my apartment, and because I put them on simultaneously when I left, the two objects were linked together in my mind. If I left the house without my wedding ring, I’d have a nagging feeling that I’d forgotten my wallet. So I kept wearing the ring and hooking it to the wallet chain when I got home and took both wallet and ring off. But here was Lola in front of me, a paean to broken habits and improved learned behaviors. In honor of her, I dropped the wedding ring onto the table by the front door. I stuffed my wallet in the back pocket of my jeans, hooked the wallet chain on my belt loop, and scooped up my keys. Lola and I went out into the light.

  “Where do you want to go?” I asked.

  “On an adventure.”

  “What kind of adventure?”

  “Who cares? Do you have anything else to do today?”

  The truth was, I didn’t. I’d been napping when Lola called because I had nothing left to do. I’d taken a long bike ride that morning. I’d cooked a big breakfast and cleaned my apartment and washed my dishes. I’d gone to the beach and read a paperback for a while. I’d ironed my work clothes and listened to records and read a magazine and had my lunch and, by one o’clock, I was nearly out of options. Before napping, I’d even contemplated taking the bus to the psych hospital on my day off and checking in on Dr. Bishop and her squirrels. That’s how little I had to do that day. “Let’s go.”

  Lola slid on a pair of sunglasses with big, round, white frames.

  “You look like a movie star with those glasses. Like you’re hiding out from the paparazzi.”

  Lola snorted. “God forbid. Could you imagine a little Puerto Rican girl like me an actress? It’d be a lifetime of playing maids.”

  “You could’ve been Rosencrantz or Guildenstern. Hell, you could’ve been Ophelia.” The second I said that last part, I regretted it. I’d only meant to say that she could play a classic role. I didn’t realize that it was probably a bad idea to tell someone fresh out of a psych institution that she could play Ophelia.

  Lola slid her glasses down her nose, looked up at me, raised an eyebrow, and pushed her glasses back in place. We kept walking. A slight ocean breeze crept up the hill in my neighborhood. The sun hung high, close enough to be warm but too far away to be hot. Wisps of clouds floated in the blue sky above. Every panorama was filled with rolling hills and palm trees and mission houses. We passed a schoolyard where three adolescents, two boys and a girl, rode their
skateboards down a short walkway and tried to ollie down the stairs. They took turns. None of them could stick the landing, but still they raced up toward the edge of the stairs, launched into the air, kept the board stuck to their feet, and had faith that their visions and skills could defy gravity.

  Lola watched the skateboarders, too. After we passed the schoolyard, she said, “Did you go see Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead?”

  “I did,” I said. “I thought they did a good job.”

  “Dr. Benengeli is an excellent director.”

  “I guess so.”

  “You guess so? She gets a bunch of mental patients to put on a three-hour play that questions our very existence, and the performance is brilliant, and you guess so?”

  “It was impressive.” So impressive, in fact, that I’d figured out how to send a telegram and sent one to Dr. Benengeli congratulating her. I guess my tone of voice didn’t betray any of this, though.

  Lola mocked me. “‘It was impressive.’ Listen to you.” She smiled and shook her head. “Don’t let on any more than you have to.”

  I took her advice and dodged that last statement. Since there had actually been a famous actress in Dr. Benengeli’s production, I said, “Did you notice who played The Player?”

  “Oh, of course. I sat in a few group sessions with her. I’m not supposed to say anything, but, wow, I could tell some stories.”

  “It’s amazing how many famous people pass through Oak View.”

  “Oh, I know,” Lola said. “When I first got there, I thought maybe I was crazier than I let myself believe. I kept walking around the grounds and seeing actors and actresses and rock stars and thinking, ‘Good lord, I’m hallucinating. Somebody stop this.’ But then, you know, you think about it for a couple of seconds and realize that of course a rehab facility this close to LA is going to be filled with celebrities.”