Madhouse Fog

by Sean Carswell

  22

  The Professor wandered into the middle of Highway 33, clearly not seeing the traffic lights or cars or town around him. Perhaps he even interpreted the concrete under his feet as something other than a highway. It seemed like a situation that demanded some kind of action. Since I was in a position to do so, I acted.

  I dinged the bell to alert the bus driver that I wanted off. He faced the windshield and spoke to the passengers behind him. “No one’s going anywhere until this old timer gets out of the road.”

  “I know that old timer.” I walked down the aisle to the front of the bus. “I’ll get him home.”

  The bus driver didn’t look at me or say anything. The only indication he gave that I was there at all came in the form of the opening of bus doors. I stepped out and into the highway in front of the bus.

  The Professor steered his course directly down the right lane of the highway. Cars whipped by to his left. The bus lingered behind him, left blinker on. The bus driver stared in his rearview mirror, hoping to find an opening into which he could escape this situation. I jogged up to The Professor and touched him gently on the elbow. He looked up, surprised, confused, clearly not recognizing me.

  “Can I help you, sir?” he asked.

  I did a quick assessment of the situation. Clearly, The Professor was having some kind of episode. Alzheimer’s? More general dementia? Senility? I couldn’t say for certain what. I felt that it was best to play along. I said, “Professor, I hate to catch you on your way home, but I was hoping to talk to you about your book.”

  “An Enquiry Concerning the Understanding of Knowledge and Existence? How do you know about that? It’s not scheduled for publication until the fall.”

  This threw me for a loop. For one, I could gather that his mind was viewing the world from more than thirty years earlier. For another, I didn’t know how I, an ostensible student, would know about a professor’s unpublished book. Unless… “I overheard you discussing it with one of your colleagues.”

  “Hmmm.” The Professor lifted his hand to his chin and rubbed. The bus driver found his opening. He whipped past. The guy in the car behind him saw The Professor and me standing in the middle of the slow lane, making things even slower.

  He honked his horn and yelled, “Get the fuck out of the road!”

  The Professor didn’t respond. I held up a hand in a not-so-universal symbol of hold on a second.

  “Would it be possible to head back to your office for a few minutes? I want to discuss your…” I looked up into my brain and tried to think of the terms he used in the book, something specific, something he’d want to talk about. More horns honked. More drivers yelled. I grabbed a floater of a thought, “Your ideas of matter and memory.”

  “Certainly.” The Professor nodded to himself. “Certainly.” He started walking again, following the same path down the slow lane. I tapped him on the elbow again.

  “Uh, sir. Your office is this way.”

  The Professor gave me that same look of surprise and confusion. “Yes. Of course,” he said.

  I steered him back toward the sidewalk. Our heels had barely touched the highway’s white line before cars started whipping by, horns still honking, middle fingers saluting a situation they perhaps didn’t think about enough to understand or perhaps thought about exactly enough to trigger their own fears of Alzheimer’s and dementia.

  The Professor was in no position to notice any of this. These horns hadn’t honked in the ’70s. None of these cars and some of these people hadn’t even been made yet. And, though the rest of us seemed to be several years into the 21st century, The Professor refused to be trapped in the tyranny of our time. His concern was on his new book and its inquiry into knowledge and existence.

  “The thing about matter and memory,” he began as we followed the sidewalk uphill toward Oak View State Psychiatric Hospital, “is our inability to reconcile the two. By the time a memory is constructed well enough to be triggered by some type of physical object, that physical object—that matter—has been altered by the changes that we refer to as time. The matter no longer belongs to the memory. And so when we think of the matter that it takes to corroborate a memory, we realize that that object is no closer to the time of the memory than we are. This validation of memory with matter is a strictly artificial construct. Do you follow me?”

  I nodded. Did I follow him? That wasn’t the point. The point was to lead him up the hill to safer ground. Which I did do. It took us about twenty minutes, but The Professor, quite fit for his age, expounded on his theory the whole way. Everything he said was remarkably close to what I’d read in his book. Amazingly close. Nearly word for word, as far as I could tell.

  I thanked The Professor for his time and left him in the care of a psych tech who kept calling him “chief.” As in, “All right, chief. Let’s get you to the cafeteria. Come on, chief.” The term seemed entirely too cruel for a man of The Professor’s caliber, particularly when I considered The Professor’s mental state, which had him floating through the early ’70s as a highly respected scholar. He acquiesced, though. I let him make his mental adjustments to arrive at whatever time period his matter and memory let him occupy.

  If I hurried, I could have caught the next bus back down the hill. But I didn’t hurry. I lingered. I thought of The Professor’s delusions. They were the madness I expected when I signed up for this job. It was diagnosable. Whether Alzheimer’s or some other type of dementia, I didn’t know. Either way, the choice was binary. One or the other. Easy enough. It was a madness that withered away loved ones and that researchers searched to cure. It had a name. It made a certain amount of sense. Still, I was shaken.

  A cool fog drifted uphill from the Pacific. The last vestiges of sunset shone through. And it was moments like this: standing alone on psych hospital grounds with a head full of thugs who may or may not have my dog and thugs who could be hired to wound my scrotum; of scientists who meddle in the unconscious of squirrels and maybe humans; of a vicious ad man; of an absent wife; of the return of the second woman I ever loved; and now of a delusional old professor who seemed equally convinced about his world as I was of mine, so much so that the only thing that remained to validate me and designate madness to him was that people around us seemed to corroborate my story…

  I thought about Don Quixote and acknowledged—not for the first time—that the only thing that turned Don Quixote’s giants into windmills was Sancho Panza’s perspective. If Sancho had seen giants, too, who would we be to deny them? And so, it was a moment like this, with the fog seeping into my brain, when working in a psych hospital seemed to be driving me crazy.

  That’s why I couldn’t hurry to the bus and spend the evening home alone with my thoughts. I knew that Dr. Benengeli’s patients would be performing their own one-act plays this evening. I started walking toward the stage on the north quad.

  On my way there, I saw the silhouettes of an exceptionally short woman and another woman in a lab coat walking alongside her. I hurried to catch them, knowing that they’d be heading in the same direction as me—to the one-acts—and that Dr. Benengeli could be my own Sancho, verifying for me that the windmills were windmills and that I wasn’t the Quixote here. They strolled north slowly. I overtook them in a couple of minutes. Dr. Benengeli saw me before I could say anything. She said, “Hey. What are you doing here so late?”

  “The Professor wandered down into town, so I walked him back up the hill,” I said.

  “What was he doing in town?”

  “Heading home, he thought. He thought he was in the ’70s.”

  “He is in his 70s,” Dr. Benengeli said.

  I was almost shaken enough to miss this semantic slip, but not quite. I said, “No. He thought he was in the 1970s. He thought he was a young professor with a new book coming out in the fall.”

  Dr. Benengeli smiled softly. “Oh,” she said. “Poor thing.”

  Which I took as a validation that The Professor was indeed the delusional one. R
elieved, I turned my glance from Dr. Benengeli to her companion. Her face threw me back into my fog. I’d never seen her before, but her face was unmistakable. It had surfaced among the research I’d been doing lately. Her name was Dr. Toru. It had to be.

  I’d been looking a little bit into Dr. Bishop and her days at Stanford, and I found pictures of her and her research assistant, Dr. Toru. Dr. Toru had a tea-colored birthmark on the side of her face. It still looked like the handprint of a very small child. The woman with Dr. Benengeli had the exact same birthmark. And, sure enough, Dr. Benengeli introduced this woman as Dr. Toru.

  “Nice to meet you,” I said. I reached out and shook her hand. I almost asked her, “What brings you here?” but my months at the psych hospital had taught me a bit more discretion. That is, I knew to look for keys or a visitor’s badge before asking a question like that. Instead, I said, “Are you looking forward to the one-acts?”

  Dr. Toru exchanged a glance with Dr. Benengeli and smiled. “Yes, I am.”

  “You’re in for a treat,” I said. I looked down at Dr. Toru’s hip. No keys. Her lab coat was open in the front. Neither her blouse nor her coat wore a visitor’s badge. The coat was clean but threadbare, like a lab coat that could’ve been purchased during the same year when The Professor’s book was published. Keys would have been visible on the hip or in the lab coat pocket or in the pockets of her tight slacks. Keys would have been visible somewhere. Clearly, she had none. No badge, no keys.

  Dr. Benengeli pointed at me and told Dr. Toru, “He’s a big supporter of the one-acts. He even got an arts grant for my plays.”

  “Impressive,” Dr. Toru said.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  Dr. Toru shifted her weight from one foot to another. She seemed agitated or nervous. I gave her a second once-over, but it wasn’t necessary. She had no keys. It was possible that she’d simply left her visitor’s badge behind—possible, but doubtful. I could be reasonably sure that Dr. Toru was, in all probability, a patient.

  I wondered if her madness dated back to her time working with Dr. Bishop. Perhaps she heard a voice in her head, too. Perhaps it was the same one I’d been hearing. Perhaps she attributed the voice to Dr. Bishop finding a way to post thoughts in our brains. Perhaps she struggled between self-diagnoses of schizophrenia and paranoia. Of course, I couldn’t bring any of this up. Instead, I said, “Really, Dr. Benengeli made it easy for me. You should’ve seen her production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.”

  “Oh, I did,” Dr. Toru said. “I was here for that.”

  Okay, then. She’s either a chronic patient or a frequent visitor. Or, maybe, like so many psych patients, she just comes in for periodic checkups. In all probability, Dr. Bishop’s former research assistant was a patient at a psych hospital. I thought about that and coupled it with the fact that Eric, Dr. Bishop’s current primary research assistant, took me on a wild squirrel chase, and I, the ancillary research assistant, was hearing a voice in my head and perhaps suffering from delusions.

  Maybe it was best to keep these realizations to myself. I wrestled with the small talk. Drs. Toru and Benengeli kept the conversation flowing. It was all pleasant enough in the springtime sunset. Still, between The Professor’s delusions and Dr. Toru’s presence, my imagination was up and running.

  Matters were made worse when, later, Dr. Toru performed her own one-act. Typically, only patients wrote and performed the one-acts. Because they were part of Dr. Benengeli’s theater-therapy program, the patients usually reenacted some drama that they were trying to release from their minds. The plays could be intensely personal. Sometimes uncomfortably so. Once I got over the intimacy, I tended to enjoy them. I didn’t watch every week or even most weeks, but I’d seen a few productions. I felt like I knew what to expect. When Dr. Toru erupted into her silent interpretive dance that included, but was not limited to, her flopping on the stage with her legs immobile and her arms held fast to her side, creating a fearful mimicry of an elephant seal, she took my breath away. This act: its name was bizarre.

  For the next week or so, I seemed to see Dr. Toru everywhere I went on psych hospital grounds. Her hip remained free of keys. She showed no sign of a visitor’s badge. A week later, she was gone.

  23

  Lola knelt in front of the dollar bin, flipping through LPs. The baby blue and pink diamonds of her argyle knee socks peeked out from between the cuffs of her jeans and her baby blue low-top Chuck Taylors. Her straight cinnamon brown hair hung in front of her face. I didn’t need to see through the hair to know that she was smiling. She’d had a grin glowing since she walked into the record shop, saw the pink plastic LP suitcase, claimed it as her own, and vowed to walk out of the store with her new record case full. Lola stopped at a record. She said to me, “Psychedelic Furs!”

  I raised my eyebrows and smiled. It wasn’t exactly a noncommittal expression on my part. All I meant to say with it was, “I’m glad you’re glad.”

  Lola turned back to the dollar bin and commenced riffling. The afternoon settled into a pattern. She would call out the names of ’80s bands, pluck the records out of the bin, and slide them into her pink case. I would raise my eyebrows and smile.

  The record store clerk sat perched on a metal stool, watching Lola. Surely, he’d seen scenes like this unravel in front of him periodically: someone of our generation wanders into a record shop and realizes that she can purchase all of her favorite songs from when she was an adolescent, on vinyl just like she’d had them originally, before she became convinced that cassettes were the way to go and got rid of all her vinyl, before the cassettes warped or melted or were eaten by her car stereo and the albums were lost, before CDs came along and took over, only to be migrating to a trash bin now that mp3s are around. Here, like the dustedoff ruins of some ancient temple, sat the relics of a lost and beautiful time. In all my years of record shopping, I’d seen shoppers reacting like Lola was now, as if she’d found a pathway into her past here at the end of the Main Street corridor. Usually, they picked up albums I’d hate to have to listen to again, or they’d purchase songs that had been in heavy rotation on radio stations for the last two or three decades. It wasn’t the stuff that impressed seasoned collectors like the record store clerk or me. I enjoyed the scene, though. The clerk probably did, too. These moments kept the ancient temple of the record store alive and kicking.

  In the end, Lola bought sixteen records, a couple of record brushes, cleaning spray, and the pink, 13” square and 4” deep LP suitcase. I bought two LPs and three seven-inch records.

  We caught the bus home. For most of the bus ride, Lola showed me her records: The Cure, The Smiths, The Vapors, Psychedelic Furs, Elvis Costello, 10,000 Maniacs, The Pixies, Big Country, Adam Ant, Love & Rockets, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Go-Go’s, a Jane Wiedlin solo record, New Order, Joy Division, and Devo. It was her own personal tribute to New Wave, the New Romantics, and ’80s college pop, all wrapped up in her pink plastic record case.

  “I can’t wait to get home and listen to all this!” she said.

  I felt like I could wait. I hadn’t heard any of those songs in several years. Some of them I did still love, or at least I thought I would still love when I listened to them again. Most of them, I could do without. Still, I caught a little bit of Lola’s enthusiasm. “We’ll have a dance party for two,” I told her.

  The #6 city bus stopped in front of the cemetery park. Lola and I disembarked, crossed Main Street, and took the side street to my apartment. I unconsciously checked the street for Frank Walters’ long, black BMW or skinheads in the bushes before we headed down the road. The guy was starting to haunt me more and more as I felt closer to Lola. I kept remembering the point he made to win our argument: everyone has one thing they can’t afford to lose.

  I thought to tell the story of Walters and Dr. Bishop’s research to Lola as we headed downhill to my place. I didn’t, though. I felt like I couldn’t warn her, or that warnings would do no good. I didn’t know when Walters would st
rike next. I knew that, every time he had come after me, he’d taken a different tack and hit me in a different place and a different way. He had a good understanding of my patterns of behavior. He knew how to get into my apartment. He knew about Lola. He knew that he could jump out at me any time he wanted. How could I tell all this to Lola? What could she do?

  Lola rescued me from my anxiety. She said, “I didn’t even see what you bought.”

  I pulled my record store booty from the bag and showed her.

  “I’ve never heard of these bands.”

  “They’re new,” I said.

  “New? These are new records?”

  I nodded.

  “Who makes new records in the 21st century?”

  “The bands I listen to.”

  “Strange,” Lola said. We crossed the street to my apartment.

  As I unlocked the door, she took my bag and looked at the records. “I thought the people at the psych hospital were weird,” she said. “But they don’t hold a candle to you and your odd little world.”

  “Thanks.”

  I opened the door to my odd little world.

  Lola spent an hour playing disc jockey on her Strawberry Shortcake record player. She sprayed and brushed the dust off her records before playing them, gently laid them on the turntable, and picked out one or two songs. We would actually get up and dance to a few of the more upbeat songs. Mostly, we sat on the floor and tapped our toes. She saved Elvis Costello for last. She plopped it onto the turntable and said, “I think we’ll listen to this whole album.”

  I picked up the record sleeve. A young, shorthaired Elvis Costello posed like a New Wave Buddy Holly. “I used to have this record,” I said.