Madhouse Fog

by Sean Carswell

  Dr. Bishop sat back down on her stool and set the buzzer on her lap. She removed her dreamcatcher earrings and tucked them away in her lab coat. She pulled the helmet over her short, curly gray hair. She even fastened the chinstrap. I don’t know why. She picked up the buzzer.

  I grabbed my clipboard and watched the squirrel’s panic ensue. He ran two strides to one end of the cage, whipped around, raced to the other end, tried to climb out, stood on his haunches, gnawed at the metal bars, gnawed at the wooden platform, jumped when he got shocked, and spun around in three full circles. He did not, however, heed the warning that Dr. Bishop traveled into Mindland to pass on.

  I gazed around the lab. A certain kind of loneliness descended upon it as soon as Dr. Bishop put on her sensory deprivation helmet. Thirteen squirrels, all in individual cages, surrounded us. They had hamster wheels that they could run on. A few squirrels ran on the wheels. The rest nibbled on hamster pellets or drank water from their tubes or napped or watched their comrade get shocked. I wondered—not for the first time—why Eric and I had gone on a wild squirrel chase instead of just buying normal rodents at a pet store. Mice, hamsters, and gerbils were all cheap. Surely, you could get a dozen rodents for thirty or forty bucks. And rodents were rodents. The only difference I could see between a squirrel and a hamster was the bushy tail. So why didn’t she just buy them? Especially for a scientist who was concerned about her work standing up to peer review.

  I watched Dr. Bishop push her buzzer. She sat upright on her stool. Her white lab coat flowed down. She wore beige slacks and dark brown penny loafers. Everything about her demeanor advertised her professionalism as a researcher except for the black motorcycle helmet and black face shield. And, of course, the thirteen caged squirrels flanking us. I made notes on the clipboard. I thought—not for the first time—that this whole enterprise was insane. For the past four weeks, I’d been passing the information off to Frank Walters without argument. I’d been taking his envelopes of cash and donating the money to various charities because I couldn’t see the harm in it. He was paying to chart the progress of a woman who was trying to speak telepathically to squirrels. I felt certain that it wasn’t going to lead to anything and that Walters wouldn’t be able to tap into any collective unconscious and wouldn’t be able to exploit it for advertising purposes. It was silly. It was absurd. It broke my heart that Clint Dempsey had been an innocent victim of this information war. Not that it would’ve been okay for him to be kidnapped and/or killed for a legitimate experiment. It just seemed, I don’t know, even more heartbreaking that he was taken and possibly died because he somehow got caught up in the madness of a kooky old doctor and a power-hungry ad exec.

  Dr. Bishop stayed the course. Lost in her black helmet, she sent out her warnings, gave the squirrel time to jump on the platform, and pushed the buzzer. The squirrel darted and gnawed and spun, but he didn’t ever find refuge in time. I counted the shocks. Dr. Bishop had sent twenty-five shocks prior to donning the helmet, plus nineteen post-helmet shocks. Six more and my volunteer time on this experiment was over for the day. On the twentieth post-helmet shock, the squirrel leapt onto the platform. His timing was perfect. He didn’t get shocked at all. I made my first mark in the “anticipation” column.

  On the twenty-first shock, he timed it perfectly again and leapt to the platform. He did it again on the twenty-second. Three times in a row. Maybe there was a pattern here. Between each shock, he left the platform and wandered the cage, only to return exactly when the shock came. He avoided the twenty-third jolt. The twenty-fourth. The twenty-fifth.

  Dr. Bishop paused before taking off her helmet. The squirrel squatted on his haunches and waited. I looked at the six marks in the anticipation column. Hmm.

  I missed the last bus home. This happened fairly often when I volunteered for Dr. Bishop. Dr. Benengeli usually gave me a lift on evenings like this. I’d called her from the lab and she told me to head on over, she was just finishing up with her progress notes. I cut across the south quad. The last of the afternoon sunlight filtered through the ancient laurel oaks that outlined the quad. A group of patients gathered in a circle on the middle of the lawn. One of the psych interns led them in group therapy. Two psych techs walked another group of patients to the cafeteria. One patient walked across the quad alone. He was a big guy, easily six and a half feet tall. He wore brand new basketball sneakers, the kind that cost a couple hundred dollars. He wore basketball shorts, a Clippers jersey with a gray undershirt underneath, and a helmet. He was not the first patient I’d seen wearing a helmet. More than once, it occurred to a patient that he could rid his head of the demons if he simply beat them out. Most of the walls around the institution were concrete block. When head met wall, wall typically won. This led to the purchase of state-issued helmets that were designed for skateboarders. This patient had wires hanging from his ears, too. At first, I thought the wires had something to do with the helmet. As I got closer, I saw that the wires were attached to earphones and a portable mp3 player.

  The patient steered a path straight for me. I could think of no reason to avoid him, so I kept on my way. I thought about that squirrel. Six times he avoided the shock. All six times he found the platform. As if he’d finally gotten the message. And he seemed so relaxed at the end. I wondered whether squirrels relax. Can they? I thought about those six leaps of his and I wanted to write them off as a coincidence. It was tough. Usually, when something happens six times in a row, it’s a pattern, not a coincidence. I couldn’t bring myself to believe that Dr. Bishop had somehow posted notes in the collective unconscious and a squirrel had read those notes and reacted. It was too much.

  The patient approached me. I remained lost in thought. He smiled and nodded. I returned both smile and nod. He stepped closer. I thought about squirrels. He reached out and grabbed my scrotum.

  For a second, I couldn’t believe it. I looked down. His hand was buried in my discount department store slacks. He squeezed. Pain seared through me. I screamed.

  The patient didn’t let go. An image flashed in my mind. I remembered a police officer who had come to the community space in Fresno to discuss rape prevention. He’d said that an effective way to fight off a rapist who overpowers you is to grab his ear and yank. “You can pull someone’s ear off without too much effort,” he’d told us. It was such a gruesome image that it remained with me. Now, with 6½’ tall, helmeted patient clamping onto my scrotum, I took the policeman at his word. I dug my fingers past the strap of his helmet and grabbed the patient’s ear. His earbud fell onto my palm. The tinny sound of a hip-hop bass filtered out. I yanked. The ear started to give. The patient’s skin tore open. His blood trickled down my fingers. The pain must’ve seared through him because he clamped down even harder on my scrotum. I couldn’t take it. I let go of his ear. He did not return the favor vis-à-vis my scrotum.

  I kept screaming. Waves of nausea flowed through me. I almost passed out and actually wished I could. I tried to pull his hand off my scrotum, but he kept a firm grip. The harder I pulled his arm away, the more painful it was for me. I felt like the skin around my scrotum would tear away from my groin. I stopped pulling and dug my thumb into the soft spot in the middle of his wrist. His veins and tendons wiggled around underneath my thumb. He still didn’t let go. I punched him in the nose so hard that my hand would have hurt if my scrotum didn’t hurt worse. Blood flowed through his nostrils and from the back of one of his ears. Tears poured from his eyes. He screamed. Bubbles of spit escaped his gaping yaw and covered my face. He did not let go.

  I had no idea how to react. I punched him in the nose again and again. His nose was long-since broken. Tears flowed from his eyes. He kept squeezing and screaming. An impossible amount of time passed. Hours. Days. Months. Or more likely, only thirty or forty-five seconds. But forty-five seconds of someone clamping onto your scrotum can be days and weeks and months.

  Two psych techs and a nurse rushed toward us. One psych tech wrapped his arms around the patient. The
other tech restrained the patient’s legs. The nurse yanked down the patient’s basketball shorts and jabbed a needle in his rear. I tried to stop punching the patient in the nose, but I couldn’t. Three punches later, he passed out in the psych tech’s arms.

  I dropped to the grass and lay there. Done. One of the psych techs stated the obvious. “Steer clear of this guy.”

  An hour later, I sat atop a towel on my new armchair. On the way home from the psych hospital, Dr. Benengeli had purchased two bags of frozen peas from a market. She told me to keep one bag in the freezer and one bag in my lap. When the bag on my lap thawed, make the switch. She had dropped me off at my apartment with those bags of peas and that advice. I did what she said. Beyond that, I tried to not move.

  My scrotum had swelled to the size of two tangerines. The medical doctor at the psych hospital had examined the injury. He said I would be okay in another day or two. The only challenge was to make it through that day or two. He had given me codeine to help with the pain.

  I sat on my new armchair in my empty little apartment, staring at the off-white walls and the renter’s brown carpet and the rabbit ears atop my television and my bare feet on the ottoman. I was in too much pain to read or watch TV or even listen to music. The codeine I had taken didn’t exactly ease the pain. It made me care a little less about the pain, though. I guess that was something.

  I picked up the book Dr. Benengeli had given me, An Enquiry Concerning the Understanding of Knowledge and Existence. I read the title several times. I wondered what the difference was between an “enquiry” and an “inquiry.” If the dictionary had been closer, I would’ve looked it up. I wasn’t about to move. I looked at the author’s name. It meant nothing to me. The cover had no painting or illustration or image to give away the contents. It was simply a design of circles and lines painted in 1970s-style earth colors. I rested my head back and took a nap.

  When I awoke, my peas had thawed. I hobbled into the kitchen, put the thawed bag of peas in the freezer, and took out the frozen bag. Every step I took back to my armchair hurt. I took one more codeine, sat, and picked up the book again. There was a photograph of the author on the back. He was a fairly young man, probably mid-40s. He had a goatee, the academic variety that was neatly trimmed and sculpted into sharp angles. The beard narrowed to a point. His hair had been slicked back. He wore a corduroy blazer, a sweater vest, and a bow tie. Even with the thirty years that had passed since this picture was taken and even considering the unfamiliar goatee and slicked back hair, the author was unmistakable. He was The Professor. This was his book.

  In a day populated by telepathic squirrels and full-frontal scrotal attacks, this book would prove to be the strangest thing I encountered.

  20

  Lola took over my kitchen. Sausages crackled in a frying pan. Gravy bubbled in a small pot. The mixer whirred through milk and butter and boiled potatoes quickly on their way to being mashed. The off-white walls and renter’s brown carpet of my apartment gradually ceded to Lola’s vision. My anonymous box of an apartment was getting a life of its own, suddenly full of the aroma of bangers and mash.

  I never would’ve expected it, but Lola was the queen of British cuisine. I learned this on the day that the mental patient attacked my scrotum. Lola had stopped by to find me codeined and sad on my armchair with a bag of frozen peas on my lap. I told her my story. She decided to nurse me back to health. Over the course of the next five days, she employed her own version of holistic healing. She started by taking the rabbit ears off my old television set, arguing that, if I couldn’t get any television stations over the air anyway, I may as well abandon the antenna. She bought a cheap DVD player and brought some movies for us to watch. She hung a few of her own paintings on the walls. They were street scenes of some far-off city, full of short, chubby girls and vibrant colors and a million little details that I could get lost in while she watched her movies on the television. She brought over her suitcase record player. It was pink and plastic and had a faded cartoon of Strawberry Shortcake on the lid. I actually remembered the record player from the old Folsom days. She set it up on a short end table next to my armchair. This way, I could play records for us without jostling my tender scrotum. And, more than anything, she cooked a feast.

  By the time the bangers and mash crackled, bubbled, and whirred in the kitchen, my refrigerator was full. Lola had put me on a diet of beans and toast and eggs for breakfast; shepherd’s pies or pork pies or cottage pies for lunch; pot noodles or curry for dinner; spotted dick or bread pudding when I wanted something sweet. She punctuated her cooking and eating with stories of her time as an artist-in-residence at a gallery that was really more of a squat in an industrial district of London’s East End. I listened to the stories. They seemed somewhat incongruous. I’m not sure why. I don’t know if I was hung up on the idea of a Puerto Rican girl finding her artistic soul in the heart of the British Empire. I don’t know if I was having trouble with the notion of a small town Central Valley girl finding her place in gritty, urban London. Or it may have seemed incongruous solely because I couldn’t reconcile my image of sad, lost, sixteen-year-old Lola with this complete woman in front of me.

  I had no trouble with the smell of bangers and mash, though. I liked that I was once again living in a place where personality hung on the walls, where meals were cooked for more than one, where sausages and gravy blotted out the residual smell of generations of nameless previous tenants. I leaned back in the armchair and took it in.

  At this point, feeling totally relaxed with the way my life was repairing itself and the way my scrotum was mending, I tried to make use of The Professor’s book. To be honest, most of it went over my head. I don’t think it was the painkillers that kept me from understanding. I just didn’t have the background knowledge. I hadn’t read that much Western philosophy. Starting with The Professor’s book was like starting to learn Spanish by reading One Hundred Years of Solitude. It would be better to take Spanish 101 first. Or, in the case of the Enquiry Concerning the Understanding of Knowledge and Existence, it would have been helpful to have an Intro to Philosophy somewhere in my brain. Which I did not have.

  Not that The Professor didn’t help out a little. He gave a primer on modern philosophy. He talked about how little we can actually know for certain. He talked about Plato, of course, and Descartes again. He doubted that we could ever find Truth with the capital T. He talked about the possibility of the world being wrapped up in this second, with the past and future just a story we tell ourselves to keep us from going insane. I nodded off a lot. At times while I was reading his book, my mind hurt worse than my scrotum.

  But there was one thing I liked, one thing that I really hung on to. The Professor talked a lot about how we know things, and how much about these things we really know. This was something I hadn’t really thought much about. I mean, when I hung out with the administrative assistants and they gossiped, I often wondered where they got their information. There’s a difference between wondering where information comes from, and wondering how we construct our view of the world. The Professor, in his book, suggested that we practice understanding how we come to recreate the world inside our minds, and how much of it is a story we tell ourselves. So I decided to sit there in my armchair, surrounded by my suddenly homey apartment, and think about how I knew things and how much I knew.

  I started by closing my eyes and listening to the sounds outside. I heard children playing in the schoolyard. Or, to be more precise, I heard sounds that I identified as human voices making words that I identified as the American dialect of the English language, and those voices carried a certain high-pitched tone that I associated with children. I stood and walked over to my apartment window and looked outside. Sure enough, three kids played on the swings in the schoolyard. I assumed they were somewhere around nine or ten years old because they were of a certain size and stature I associate with that age. In the field behind the kids, a teenage girl sat on a hill. Her friends sat around her. They
chatted, plucked strands of high grass and rolled them in their fingers, and smoked cigarettes. One teenage girl kept an eye on the kids on the swing.

  I decided that the girl was the caretaker of the ten-year-olds, probably either big sister or babysitter. Most likely big sister. A babysitter would normally take her job more seriously and sit closer to the kids on the swings. A big sister might resent that she can’t just hang out with her friends, so she’d sit farther away and create a physical and emotional distance from her role as caretaker. Of course, I didn’t know any of this. All I knew was that six humans were in the schoolyard across the street from me. Three of them swung on swings and three smoked something. Everything else: their ages and relationships, even what they smoked, was an assumption, a story I told myself.

  I turned back into my apartment and kept playing The Professor’s game. I walked over to a wall where I found one of Lola’s paintings. I tried to look at it more deeply than I ever had. I focused on the young woman standing on the street. Her head was a little big, slightly out of proportion for a human, giving her a cartoon feel. She had dark brown eyes, eyes the color of an old leather flight jacket, one that has been worn, cleaned, well oiled, closeted, loved. The eyes shared that softness, that sense of comfort. In each eye was a fleck of ivory paint positioned just so to catch the glow of the moon above the street. These eyes are Lola’s eyes. Of course, they weren’t Lola’s eyes. Lola’s eyes were still in her head in the kitchen. These eyes in front of me weren’t eyes at all. They were dried bits of paint on a canvas. But such is the power of art that I could stare into these dried bits of paint, and they became eyes and stared back at me. I could imagine those eyes wanted to say something, or maybe I wanted to say something to them. I could project a world onto those eyes. It’s the world I see as Lola’s. I could smell her bangers and mash and imagine her in London. These eyes in London.