“What happened to it?”
I shrugged.
Lola looked at my small box of records. She said, “For a collector, you sure don’t have a lot of records.”
“No. I don’t.”
“Why is that?”
I shrugged again. Lola crawled over to where I sat on the floor. She folded her legs underneath her and stared into my eyes as if there were a diorama hidden in the irises. “You’re hiding something,” she said, “because records are a hard thing to lose. CDs, cassettes, sure. You leave them in your car, they get melted, stepped on, scratched, snapped in half, whatever. But you keep records at home, on a shelf. They only move from the shelf to the record player and back. How do you lose them?”
She had me there. I could see that I couldn’t avoid it any longer. I said, “I lost them in the divorce.”
“How did that happen? I thought you said you just signed papers, and it was over with.”
“Before we signed the papers, she sold all my records.”
“What? How many?”
“All of them. I don’t how many. Fifteen hundred? Two thousand?”
Lola stood up at this. She put her hands on her hips and stared down at me. “Two thousand records! How much did she get for them?”
“I have no idea. It depends on how she sold them, if she knew what each one was worth, all that stuff. If she sold them to a record store or a collector, she probably only got a grand or so. If she sold them individually on eBay or something, she could’ve gotten a lot. Over twenty grand, if she were smart about it.” I scooted back about two feet and leaned against the front of the couch. I stretched my arms across the couch cushions, as if I were totally relaxed. The move seemed affected, even to me. “I don’t know how smart about it she was.”
Though I knew my wife. I knew she was smart. She probably made more than twenty grand on the whole lot.
“Twenty thousand dollars! And you didn’t get any of it?”
I shook my head.
“Not a dime?”
“Not a penny.”
“I’d be furious.” Lola stomped her foot. The Elvis Costello record skipped. “I am furious. Where is this woman? I need to have a talk with her.”
I hooked my finger into the belt loop of Lola’s jeans and gave her a little tug. “Sit down,” I said. “It’s okay.”
“It’s not okay,” Lola said. But she sat down.
I put my arm around her shoulder and squeezed. Lola leaned into me. I thought about what she said. I’d thought about that record collection a fair amount, about where the records had landed and the malice behind the move. The only two malicious things that my ex-wife had done in all the years of our marriage and in the months of our divorce were selling my record collection and kidnapping Clint Dempsey. The moves seemed calculated on her part, as if to say, “I’m going to do these two awful things to you as a way of making sure that the divorce sticks, and we both get on with our lives.” Or maybe she didn’t articulate it that way. That was the effect, anyhow. When she told me about selling the record collection, I stopped arguing and signed the paperwork. When she kidnapped Clint Dempsey, I was done with her. The divorce stuck.
It was natural, too, for Lola to be bothered by the money. I wasn’t. I’d made that much off Frank Walters and donated it all to charity. I made more money working at the psych hospital than I spent, anyway. And it’s not that twenty thousand dollars isn’t a lot of money. It is. It’s just that I’m well aware that twenty thousand dollars wouldn’t make my life significantly better or worse. I didn’t need it. I wasn’t particularly anxious to buy what it would pay for. I did miss the records, though. If I’d known that my ex-wife was selling them, I would’ve paid her asking price. But they had to be my records. Not just another copy of the same album. I would’ve only paid for the exact same records. I tried to explain this to Lola.
“It’s like this,” I told her. “We can get all this stuff as an mp3 now. The only real value in the record anymore is the artifact. The way it ties you to the past. Like, if the record has a familiar pop or crack on a favorite song. Or the artwork triggers memories, you know. Just looking at the checkerboards on that Elvis Costello record made me suddenly get a feeling like Folsom again. Or even, I bought this Stiff Little Fingers record in Cincinnati one time and the girl behind the counter charged me half-price for no reason at all…”
Lola pinched the tender area just below my bicep. “I know why she charged you half price.”
I made a little show of ignoring her and kept going. “Sometimes when I would play that record—years later—I’d see the little green sticker with the price on it and feel like I was back on tour with my old band. That’s what I miss about all those records. The memories they brought back. That’s why it broke my heart when she sold them all.”
Lola slid her hand under my t-shirt. She dragged her fingernails back and forth across my chest. Even in the warm springtime afternoon, goosebumps formed in the wake of her fingernails. “What a jerk,” she said. “Let’s go kick her ass.”
I tucked a few locks of Lola’s hair behind her left ear. “No need,” I said. “We’re here now. We’ll make new memories.”
Lola bit her bottom lip. She climbed over my outstretched legs and straddled me. We started kissing. I don’t think my cheesy line led to this. It had just gotten to be that time of the afternoon: the time when we generally drifted into having sex.
We kissed for the rest of the Elvis Costello side, then Lola unfastened my belt and pulled my plaid shorts down past my ankles. She slid my shorts off my right leg and left them hooked on my left ankle. Her fingers undid her own belt. She pulled off her jeans and her argyle socks.
I lifted my t-shirt. By the time I had it over my head, Lola had straddled me again. She slid down and my heart raced with the initial rush of being inside her, that warm and wet feeling. And with it came a little apprehension. I was still a little pensive because Lola had been way too rough the first few times we had sex. She’d left several bruises from her bites. She’d grabbed hold of the long hairs on top of my head and pulled so hard it made my roots sore. And not just sore while we were doing it. Sore for a couple of days afterward. She also clawed me with her fingernails, leaving track marks up and down my back, drawing blood in places. Once, when she was riding me, she reached around and punched me in the scrotum. And this was after the Claw incident. So there was a bit of apprehension.
But then, maybe the fourth or fifth time we had sex, she just stopped doing any of those things. We hadn’t talked it over. I’d planned to ask her to stop, but I hadn’t asked yet. She just stopped. I was glad she had. I also kept in mind the old adage that things that go away for no reason come back the same way.
Lola nibbled my neck, traced the line of my spine with the pads of her fingers. I snapped back into the moment, letting all apprehensions drift away. I caught my breath and relaxed and followed Lola’s flow.
She rode me on the floor until the rug started to burn her knees. We took it into the bedroom from there, Lola leading me with the sway of her hips. We climbed onto the bed, where we sweated and moaned and rocked back and forth. We’d been having enough sex at this point for me to know some of Lola’s little hints: how she arched her back when she wanted me to cup both of her breasts in my hands, how she pinned and squeezed my shoulders when she wanted me to keep doing exactly what I was doing, how she got that sexy insincere look when she was faking it and how she didn’t care at all how she looked when she really was in the throes of something good. When she got tired, when she’d had her fun, when she was ready, we rolled over so that I was on top. Lola locked onto my eyes and squeezed my ass and pulled me close. And when it felt like time to come, I let go of everything else in the world.
After a quick nap and leftovers for dinner, after playing my new records on Lola’s Strawberry Shortcake record player, after our encore in the bedroom and going to sleep in earnest, I awoke. It was just before three o’clock in the morning. I went into the kitchen and poured my
self a glass of water. Naked, with all the lights off, I drank the water. I noticed that one of the blinds in the front window was off kilter. I walked over to the window to adjust it. Because my apartment was darker than the street outside, I could see out the window. A large man sat on the schoolhouse lawn, across the street from me. He smoked a cigarette. The tip glowed orange, then seemed to vanish as he pulled it away from his lips. The man wore a white t-shirt, a bomber jacket, and tight jeans with the cuffs rolled up. His head had been shaven completely bald. He stared directly at my window. I stared back. I wasn’t sure if he could see me, or if he wanted to see me. I felt vaguely like I was dreaming, but this was no dream.
Sitting next to the guy was a little dog. I looked closer and wondered if my mind and the moonlight were playing tricks on me or not, because that pup looked just like my old buddy Clint Dempsey. I looked more closely at the man’s face. Of course, one side of it was obscured with a tribal tattoo. I flicked the blind back. A fire burned in my brain. I ran into my bedroom, hopped into a pair of jeans, pulled on a hoodie, and raced out my front door.
Both man and dog had vanished.
24
On the farthest reaches of the psych hospital grounds stands an abandoned arboretum. Dr. Benengeli had told me about it on my first day at Oak View, a mischievous smile painted on her face. She’d said that when RW Winfield, industrialist and primary patron of Winfield University, was still alive, he had a little cottage on the northeastern edge of campus. Of course, he’d had his home where he lived with his wife and entertained guests and all, but he also had this little cottage where he spent his time alone. Apparently, he’d spent so much time there that, when he died, his wife had placed his ashes in the cottage. Out of respect for the dead, or perhaps fear of the dead, very few people went near the cottage. Painters and handymen kept the place standing, but that was it. University administrators left the cottage and the grounds around it more or less untouched for a couple of generations. In the ’60s, a botany professor decided to turn that untouched ground into an arboretum. He wrote a small grant, bought a few local trees, and planted them. As time went on and funding grew, the botany professor expanded his collection of indigenous trees. Graduate students joined the project, trees were catalogued, placards were engraved and installed, and a walking path was paved between the trees and shrubs. Eventually, park benches dotted the walking path. It became a popular spot for students on first and second dates to show off a small chunk of the knowledge they were paying over thirty thousand dollars a year for. More importantly, it became a popular make-out spot. By the time scandal struck Winfield, the botany professor had long since retired and moved to Florida. No one took on the voluntary upkeep of the arboretum.
Dr. Benengeli had reveled in the story when she’d told it to me. She loved the idea that RW Winfield, the man who’d hated everything Southern Californian so much that he’d banned palm trees from campus in the university’s charter, should spend his eternal rest surrounded by all the indigenous trees of the state he hated. Well, all except the palm tree, which was still conspicuously absent when Dr. Benengeli told me the story.
Now, several months after Dr. Benengeli had told me the story, after I’d become fully enmeshed in the madness surrounding my new life as psych hospital grant writer, a baby palm tree stood at the edge of the cottage. The presence of the palm tree combined with the tree’s exceptionally small stature convinced me that Dr. Benengeli had planted it. I sat on a bench in front of the cottage, watching that exceptionally small palm tree wave in the light morning breezes and letting my mind drift. I wondered about Dr. Benengeli and what play she’d direct next. I wondered about the history of the arboretum. Had an eighteen-year-old Lola walked these paths with an upperclassman Lothario? Had she succumbed to his charms? Had she been a seductress here? Had she returned to walk this path during her stay as a patient at Oak View? Would she like to come here with me now, find a private spot among the shadows, make love among the fuzzy blooms of the black elder, atop a bed of needles scattered from a Monterey pine?
I let my mind drift into daydreams. I did not wonder about Dr. Bishop and her squirrel experiments. Dr. Bishop was on her way to this bench in front of this cottage. It certainly was a mysterious place to meet. Still, I figured that she would offer answers when she got here.
I strolled around the arboretum. Weathered placards helped identify the blue, bottlebrush flowers of lupine (lupinus), the vibrant yellow flowers of the flannelbush (fremontodendron), and the cottony, soft blue flowers of the deer brush (ceanothus). I checked the leaves to distinguish the difference between a California black oak (quercus kelloggii) and a coast live oak (quercus agrifolia). I kicked acorns against the door of the cottage. And, when I finally sat back down and started daydreaming again about a stroll through the shadows with Lola, Dr. Bishop hustled down the path. She looked winded, like this walk had taken everything out of her. A thought flicked in my head: why didn’t she ask me to meet her somewhere more convenient? I let that thought pass and reminded myself that surely, she’d brought me here to answer some questions.
I stood to meet her. She stretched out her hand. I took it. Her fingers felt like a bag of ballpoint pens in my palm. She gripped tightly and used my hand for leverage in sitting down. She took several deep breaths. Tiny beads of sweat formed on the borderlands where her short, curly, gray hair met her forehead. I sat next to her. I retrieved a bottle of water from my backpack and offered it to her.
“It’s not real bottled water,” I said. “I filled it from the water fountain in the Williams Building.”
Dr. Bishop took the bottle in one hand and patted my thigh with the other hand. “Thank you, hon,” she said.
I watched Dr. Bishop drink the water. Her fingernails were manicured as always, but her fingers looked bonier than ever before. In fact, Dr. Bishop had been getting gradually thinner as this experiment went on. I’d noticed but hadn’t paid attention. I watched the skin under her chin go up and down with each gulp. The stress of her crazed experiments must have been getting to her.
Dr. Bishop finished half the bottle of water. She tried to hand it back to me. I told her to keep it. She thanked me and took a few more deep breaths. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Give me a few seconds to recover.”
She took a handkerchief from her purse and dabbed the sweat along her forehead. Small blotches of foundation dotted the white handkerchief. She folded it and returned it to her purse. She took one last deep breath, filling her lungs completely, swelling her chest, then letting it all out in a long, fluid exhale.
“I heard you read The Professor’s book,” she said.
“I did,” I said, wondering how she’d heard that. The only person I’d talked to about that book was The Professor and that was in the middle of his episode. Surely, he didn’t remember and tell Dr. Bishop.
“Interesting, huh? All about how we come to believe things, about how many possible ways there are to view the world. All that jazz.”
“You didn’t know The Professor when he was faculty here at Winfield, did you?”
“Heavens, no,” Dr. Bishop said. “I spent most of my career at Stanford. I came here only when the hospital opened. This is my retirement job.” She winked at me, though I wasn’t sure why. Still, the wink unleashed a rush of paranoia inside me. “But back to The Professor’s book. Here’s my question: when you read it, did it open you up somewhat to new possibilities? Did it make you think there might be whole worlds around us that we know nothing about?”
“Somewhat.” I shrugged. “I think I felt that way even before reading the book.”
“Good. Good. That’s why I made sure to hire you down here. I could sense that curiosity in you. You’re open to new ideas. You’re more intelligent than you let on. You’re a very special person.”
I smiled. “Flattery will get you everywhere.”
“I don’t mean to flatter you,” Dr. Bishop said. “I’m just about to tell you something very odd. I want you to be prepar
ed to take in what I’m about to tell you.”
I stared down at my feet. An acorn sat between my sneakers. I stepped on it with my right foot and dragged the acorn in a circle underneath the ball of my foot. Pangs of guilt stabbed me. I knew Dr. Bishop was about to give me very sensitive information about her experiment, and I didn’t want that information. I said, “Listen, before you start, I have to tell you something.” I took my own deep breath.
Dr. Bishop cut in. “You’ve been selling information to Frank Walters. I know. I’m sorry about that.”
“No. I’m sorry about that.” I paused and let her statement sink in. “I don’t know what you would be sorry about.”
“I convinced you to do that. I know you didn’t want to. I know you fought against him and forged the information and he even stole your little dog over it. I’m sorry. I didn’t want any of it. But, please understand, I needed you to sell the information—the real information—from these experiments to Walters. I needed to throw him off the trail.”
I kept staring at my feet, grinding the acorn under my shoe. “Wait. Hold on a minute. This doesn’t make sense. How did you know about Clint Dempsey? What do you mean you convinced me?”
Dr. Bishop patted my knee, gently poking the skin with her bony fingers. “I need you to relax and listen for a while. Imagine you’re listening to my story just like you read The Professor’s book: you’re passive, just taking in information and digesting it before you decide whether or not to believe it. Can you do that?”
“I guess.”
She lifted her hand from my knee, took another sip of water, screwed the top back on, and took one more deep breath. “Okay,” she said. “Here’s the story. About twenty-five years ago, I became a full professor at Stanford. My teaching load became nearly nonexistent and I was able to spend my time largely doing research. Since I’d been a Jungian scholar, I narrowed my research interests down to the collective unconscious. I conducted several experiments with the collective unconscious, I published articles, I wrote books on it, all that jazz. I was an authority on it. I am an authority on it. I know it sounds pompous to say that, but there it is. So, I came to feel like I knew the collective unconscious well. I started to ask further questions. For instance, if we really do receive cultural messages from beyond our conscious mind—which we really do; I have a body of scholarship to prove it—then who puts those cultural messages up there for us? Can we post our own messages? Can we consciously enter the realm of the collective unconscious? Or, more specifically, can we visit the place I call Mindland?
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