Madhouse Fog

by Sean Carswell

  “Now, as you know, once a scientist starts asking questions like this, she has to search for answers. That’s what being a researcher is all about. So I started searching. With the help of a junior colleague, I spent six years exploring ways to enter Mindland. I couldn’t find that way. But I was getting closer. I started to believe that it could be done, that I could find my way there. It was exactly at this time, nearly six years ago, when Frank Walters came into my life. I noticed that, as the experiments went on, my junior colleague suddenly had money that she was spending on luxuries. They weren’t extravagant, per se. She wasn’t coming to the lab in jewelry and designer lab coats, but she was buying art, new furniture, a koi pond in the back yard… these types of things. Purchases atypical for a research professor. I also noticed that she was having regular lunches with a blind man who stood out not so much because he was blind but because he was always impeccably dressed. Have you noticed that about him?”

  “Oh, of course. You could feed a starving nation with the money he spends on clothes.”

  “See, you think about these things. That’s why I brought you here. But we’ll get to that. Back to Frank Walters and my junior colleague. I noticed her lunches with him and I looked into who he was. When I saw he worked in advertising, my blinders fell off my face and I saw the dangers of my research. Namely, if I could visit Mindland and post messages that others would receive unconsciously, then so could other people. Anywhere people can post messages, advertisers creep in. But here’s the danger. I want you to listen closely. This is the scariest thing about the world you’re about to enter: when we receive a message from Mindland, we don’t recognize it as a message. We recognize it as our own thought. Do you see the danger there?”

  It took me a second to digest all this. A pine needle fluttered down and landed on the bench between Dr. Bishop and me. I picked the needle up and rolled it between the pads of my fingertips and thumbs, releasing a subtle pine scent. “Basically, then, what you’re saying is that if there were commercials in Mindland, they wouldn’t be like commercials now. It wouldn’t be like someone saying to us, I don’t know, ‘Buy a car,’ for example. It would be someone making us think ‘I need to buy a car,’ for no reason whether we wanted one or not. Like a voice inside our heads, not outside.”

  “Exactly,” Dr. Bishop said. “So, for the first time, I saw the tremendous danger of consciously entering Mindland: you could give people thoughts, and the people would think that the thoughts were their own. I don’t know that this is an ability people should have.”

  “So did you abandon the research?”

  “I gave all appearances of that, yes. I broke from the junior colleague. I retired from Stanford. I took all of my personal research with me and moved down here. This was shortly after Winfield University had closed. The State took over the campus as part of the bankruptcy settlement. My son was employed here again as the head of Roads and Grounds…”

  “Wait a second. Your son? Eric?”

  “Yes. Eric is my son.”

  “But his last name is Jurgenson. How can that be?”

  “His father’s last name was Jurgenson. Technically, my last name is, too, but I use my maiden name in professional settings. After all, I’m the one who earned the doctorate, right?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Dr. Bishop gave me a little smile. “Moving on…

  “Eric was employed down here and essentially had the facilities of an abandoned university at his disposal. Well, I guess he didn’t ‘essentially’ have the facilities at his disposal. He literally had them. Think of it: a whole university open to no one but me. So I came down here and worked with Eric. I championed the cause of making this a long-term psychiatric hospital. I brought in doctors who had no interest in my research, found funding, and kept the place alive so that I could tinker with my own little projects completely under the radar. And, guess what? Walters came back.

  “He started sniffing around. He tried to get Dr. Benengeli to inform on me. Luckily she thinks I’m crazy. Thankfully. She’s also honest enough to tell me everything. About Walters. About me being crazy.

  “Walters pursued Eric, too, until Walters’ nephew got a little too rough with Eric, and Eric stabbed him.”

  “What?” I asked. I was surprised. Not that Eric would stab a guy. That didn’t surprise me at all. I was surprised to think Walters would back off that easily. “All I have to do is stab Connor and Walters will leave me alone?”

  Dr. Bishop shook her head. “Eric also shot at Walters. He blew out four of Walters’ car windows. Walters and his nephew were in the car at the time. We’re all lucky Eric didn’t hit one of them.”

  “You said it,” I said. Hope deflated inside me. Maybe I could bring myself to stab Ape Man, but gunplay was beyond me.

  “I was so close to Mindland, though. I felt like I was within a year of finding a way in, but that also meant that, one way or another, Walters would be a year away from finding a way in. I needed someone to throw him off my trail. That’s why I sat on the hiring boards of this hospital. This way, I could interview employees and get a real sense of who he or she was and what they wanted in life. And when I interviewed you, I thought, here’s my guy. Here’s the guy who’s going to shake Frank Walters for me. And that’s why I brought you in.”

  Dr. Bishop paused again. She’d worked up a sweat with all this talking. She took her foundation-dotted handkerchief out of her purse and patted her whole face dry.

  I thought about what she’d been telling me. “So, wait,” I said. “When you first started talking, you said that you’d convinced me to sell information to Frank Walters. But if you and I have never had a conversation about all of this before, and I’ve never heard you mention Walters’ name until just now, then… Wait.” I chewed on it all for a few seconds. “That means you found a way in, didn’t you?”

  Dr. Bishop nodded. “That’s why we’re here today,” she said. “To show you the way into Mindland.”

  I nodded along, but I wasn’t sure what to believe. Most of me still resided in Dr. Benengeli’s camp. I thought Dr. Bishop was crazy. At least, I wanted to think Dr. Bishop was crazy. It was too creepy to think about her slinking into my unconscious and convincing me to do things that were more or less against my nature. But then again, I couldn’t be sure. So much of the world flutters along without my comprehension of it. Why not this point, also? It did seem at least somewhat possible. It would explain why I broke completely from who I was and sold information to Walters. It would explain the voice in my head that had been guiding some of my actions since it convinced me to stay down here on Nietzsche’s last day. But it also raised questions. The first of which I asked Dr. Bishop. “But if you can enter into the collective unconscious and convince me to do things, why not just do the same to Walters? Why don’t you just go make him think that you’re crazy, that none of this could happen?”

  “It’s not that simple. The thoughts I plant are clumsy. You noticed when I did it. You blamed yourself and wondered if it were some sort of thought disorder, but you were in a special situation. For one, you work in a psych hospital, which makes you and everyone else who works in a psych hospital just a little bit paranoid that you may have one of these mental illnesses. For another thing, you didn’t know what kind of research I was doing, so it didn’t occur to you that I could really be the voice in your head. Even though the voice sounded just like me, you attributed it to your imagination or something deeper. Walters wouldn’t be so flexible. He’d never blame himself. He’d know it was me.” Dr. Bishop smoothed a wrinkle on her slacks, then looked up at me. She added, “Also, you can only plant thoughts that people are capable of having. You can only make people believe what they’re willing to believe. Frank Walters isn’t willing to believe that my research is all a hoax.”

  “So that’s why you got the squirrels? That’s why you painted the shield on the motorcycle helmet?”

  “Exactly. That’s why all of this happened. Talking to pets? Co
me on. I’m a researcher. I’m a scientist. I’m a professor emeritus at Stanford University. I’m not going to genuinely waste my time with such things.”

  “Only problem is, when I sold all this to Walters, he didn’t think you were crazy. He thought I was lying.”

  “Yes. That is our problem.”

  “And the solution?”

  “I don’t know.” Dr. Bishop lowered her head, staring down at the needle-strewn path at her feet, at the way her slacks hung from her bony knees. “I think that’s a problem you’re going to inherit.”

  “So then you don’t have answers for me?”

  “No more than I’ve already given you.”

  “Then why are we here?”

  “So I can burden you with my load,” she said. She pulled an ancient key out of her purse. It looked like a miniature version of the keys to cities that mayors give out to dignitaries, with two prongs jutting down one end and a heart-shaped loop for a handle. The key was made of brass, but the brass had turned mostly green over the decades. Dr. Bishop stood and took three steps toward the cottage. She smiled. “Come on,” she said.

  Not much light shone inside the cottage. It had been built prior to the days when houses were wired for electricity, so the only light we had was the little pinpoint shining from the end of Dr. Bishop’s penlight. Based on what I could see from that light, the cottage was pretty sparse. White sheets hung over a few pieces of furniture. A dark wood, rolltop desk sat in the corner beside a window. Wainscoting surrounded the four walls, giving way only for the doors and a small fireplace wrapped by a large, ornate mantle. The hardwood floors looked worn more than battered, like the seat of a favorite old rocking chair. In the back of the room was another door. Dr. Bishop opened it and led me inside. She said, “Watch your step.”

  I followed her down a steep and narrow staircase. Her penlight did little to illuminate the room at the bottom of the stairs. When we got there, she shone the light around a room I absolutely did not expect.

  “What is this place?”

  Dr. Bishop traced a long, hardwood path a little more than three feet wide, flanked by rounded gutters about twelve inches in diameter. At the end of the path, ten small circles formed a triangle. “What does it look like?” Dr. Bishop asked.

  “A one-lane bowling alley.”

  “And therein lies RW Winfield’s long-hidden secret: the guy was an avid bowler.”

  “And his bowling alley is the gateway to Mindland?”

  “Something like that.”

  Dr. Bishop sat in the chair at the little scoring table. I sat on a footlocker that was almost six feet long. Dr. Bishop explained to me that there were nineteen steps one took to enter Mindland. She offered to guide me through. I think she would have insisted if I refused, but I wasn’t about to refuse. I didn’t need a voice in my head to make me want to go along with this.

  The first seventeen steps were bizarre, to say the least. She had me touch my toes ten times, perform eight jumping jacks, kneel down to untie and tie the laces on my shoes, hum “Ode to Joy” while picturing a loved one from my past, walk down the bowling lane and touch the circle first for the seven pin and second for the ten pin, sit on the triangle and imagine a ball rolling my way, imagine the ball rolling through me as if I were not made of matter, return up the alley through the right gutter, turn and bow to the lane, take five deep breaths, open the footlocker I was sitting on, climb in, lace my fingers with the right forefinger on top, switch hands so that the left finger was on top, close the lid of the locker, and prepare to travel. The last two steps were very similar to practicing meditation. I repeated a mantra in my head until my conscious thoughts were held at bay. From there, I unconsciously found an external current for my conscious thoughts to ride out of my brain, and I let my thoughts ride along that current.

  25

  At first, you don’t know if you’ve arrived or not. It’s like when you enter into total darkness and you can’t quite tell if your eyes are open or closed. You reach up with a finger, gently touch the eyeball or eyelid, and realize that in darkness like this, it’s a moot point. What matters is only what the other four senses can tell you. Likewise, when you follow Dr. Bishop’s directions and enter into Mindland, it looks just like your conscious mind. You see exactly what your mind saw the moment before entering. What matters is where you can go from there.

  So I arrived into the bowling alley, still in the footlocker I’d laid down in, still in complete darkness, my mind still reeling with Dr. Bishop’s anxieties about the discovery of this place and the threat of Walters forever looming. I stood up and realized that, if I could stand, then I had to be somewhere beyond the footlocker I’d laid down in just a few minutes earlier. I looked around the faint light of the alley. Something else was in there with me. It panted. Its nails scraped against the hardwood floor. I thought of a tennis ball and a tennis ball was in my hand. I dropped the ball onto the floor. It ricocheted and landed back in my palm. The creature yapped. I knew that yap. Hello, Clint Dempsey.

  I remembered Dr. Bishop’s first instruction: look for a door. Of course, I knew where the cottage door had been, but I didn’t head up the stairs to it. Dr. Bishop had told me that wasn’t the door I was looking for. I tossed the tennis ball towards the back of the alley and listened. It floated for a few seconds, landed, bounced once, twice, and then hit something that sounded wooden and hollow. I followed that sound. Clint Dempsey padded down the hallway in front of me, retrieved the ball, and returned it. I threw it again. I followed the sound. Everything remained dark. I measured the distance between the door and me by how far I could throw the ball. Pretty soon, the ball was ricocheting off the door, and shooting back at me. Clint Dempsey would have to actually run behind me to get it. And, then, I was at the door.

  I knelt down to pet Clint Dempsey. “You stay here, boy,” I said. “I need to go through this door alone.”

  Clint Dempsey yapped again. I tossed the ball back down the alley I’d just crossed. Clint Dempsey shot off after the ball. I opened the door in front of me.

  Daylight blinded me for a second. I stepped out into it. Dust from the gravel street rose with every step. A meadow opened up in front of me, dotted with squat, knotty trees similar to the California landscape but somehow shorter, drier, more jagged. A hill rose directly in front of me. Something resembling the Parthenon, or at least a replica not in ruins, stood atop the hill. I wandered toward it and found a group of bearded white men wearing white tunics, chatting and laughing.

  One of the robed men sat afar from the rest. His back rested against the trunk of an olive tree. He used a flat rock for a desk and wrote on a small papyrus scroll. I could see his thoughts appearing like a hologram in front of him. He was constructing a chariot with a white horse and a black horse that seemed at odds with one another. I reckoned I could see his thoughts because they were already well known to me. I also figured he was the guy to help me make the most of Mindland. I interrupted his train of thought to say, “I hate to interrupt, but…”

  The hologram of the chariot dissipated. He didn’t seem bothered. He said, “That’s the beauty of writing. It exists without time. Once the words are written, you can always go back to them, build on them, revise them, expand them.”

  “That’s true, I guess.”

  The man stood. “Well, then,” he said. “Maybe we should ride that chariot.” He whistled and, from some place I couldn’t see, the white horse and black horse emerged. He stepped up and took the reins. “Ride with me,” he said.

  I stepped onto the chariot and grabbed hold of the handrail. The man cracked the reins. The horses started running. He had one rein attached to each horse. I could see he had to give them different cues to make them act together. Regardless, they ran side by side, nearly in step. We raced across the dusty ground for maybe fifty yards before the ground started to give way below us and we ascended into the sky.

  “Holy shit,” I said.

  The man looked at my white knuckles clut
ching the handrail. “You don’t have to grip so hard,” he said. “You’re metaphysical now. The physical laws don’t apply. There’s no falling off this chariot.”

  I believed him enough to loosen my grip, but not enough to let go. The ground grew smaller below us. We left the land that could’ve been Oak View or Athens or any Mediterranean-type environment: rolling hills of mostly brown and defiant shades of green; tough, tenacious trees that hardened their trunks to weather droughts; dry washes and thin rivers racing to empty all their water into the sea; the sea and the islands on the horizon. We continued our ascent out of the atmosphere and toward the sun, leaving the reflective glow of the earth and moving into the darkness that led to the sun. The wind raced through me, not the way winters in wet climates seem to creep into your bones, but more the way you can feel cold water slink down your esophagus on a hot day. I was neither particularly hot nor cold. I had no trouble breathing even though technically I seemed to have left the atmosphere as well as all the oxygen that implies. I began to see what he meant by metaphysical.

  The man spoke about the soul and its descent to the earth and our search for Truth and Wisdom. At first, I said, “Part of what you’re talking about is writing, isn’t it?”

  The man nodded. “Our search for perfection is marred by imperfect forms. Through language. Through writing. Words are imprecise tools to shape the true meaning of things. It is only as we ascend to heaven that we can find Truth and Wisdom.”