Madhouse Fog

by Sean Carswell

  “Right, well, I think we’re in the middle of an experiment just like that. I think the guinea pigs are actors, and we’re really the guinea pigs. I think they’re testing to see how much we’ll eat in the face of starvation, how long it’ll take us to start feeding the actors.”

  Pop climbed back into the top bunk. “I think you’re being paranoid,” he said. “And I’m going back to sleep.”

  Before breakfast that morning, I insisted on seeing the director of the study. It was Dr. Bishop. I told her what I thought of the study, told her that I thought it was unethical and I wanted out. Dr. Bishop was a bit different then. She was bigger and younger. She didn’t have that grandmotherly quality. She projected a lot of authority, especially sitting in her black leather chair behind an oak desk in a huge faculty office at Stanford. She treated me as if I were being paranoid. She scolded me. She harangued me. She waved the contract I’d signed and threatened to sue. She placated me. She took every action she could to bully me, and when I didn’t back down, she admitted that I was right. The study really was about complicity. That’s why they knew about the bagels I’d brought in the night before, and about me explaining it all to Pop.

  She told me, “We’ve been doing this study for six months. We’ve had over three hundred proctors. You’re the only one who fed the actors.”

  Dr. Bishop’s assistant pulled Pop out of the study. She paid the two of us for the week and sent us on our way.

  Pop and I came back six days later to pick up Fester. His face was rounder and a genuine gut formed above his belt. He’d gained an easy fifteen pounds.

  On the drive home, I explained to him about the experiment. He said, “Hell, I figured that out on the first day, but I wasn’t about to give up a week of feasts by complaining about it.”

  I thought about the experiment again after my first night in the bowling alley footlocker. I rode my bike home from the psych hospital and wondered about paranoia and schizophrenia. It’s hard to know what to do with paranoia when you realize that you really are enmeshed in a conspiracy; it’s hard to know what to do with schizophrenia when someone really is planting voices inside your head. And I couldn’t help wondering how long this had been going on. I had to think that this wasn’t Dr. Bishop’s last experiment, but her life’s work. I had to think she’d been looking for someone like me since 1991, that she’d found me back then in her study, that she’d watched me spend fifteen years struggling to make a small difference and turning my back on everything that a guy like Frank Walters had the power to offer, and that she’d picked me as her heir for exactly these reasons.

  Because that’s the wonderful thing about paranoia: it makes you feel so special.

  27

  I’m going to have to be a little more honest about Mindland, now. Initially, I screamed out that I didn’t want to be there. I doubt it was true, even at the time. I was scared in that first trip. I have a little bit of a phobia about heights. Flying in a chariot isn’t the best thing for that. And, like all mortals, I fear death, so becoming metaphysical and ascending anywhere invites thoughts into the unknown, thoughts that are petrifying no matter who you are and how you brace yourself for them. So there was the fear.

  But there was something else, some kind of internal lump, soft and squishy, warm and inviting, the kind of thing that makes us venture into the unknown, that gives memories meaning and wouldn’t let me stay away. That lump seemed to be saying, “Buddy, you got to ride a chariot with Plato and hear a Trickster tale from an original ancient. It was every bit as cool as you thought it would be.” I guess, because of this lump, I’d barely pedaled my bike to the bike path at the edge of the psych hospital grounds before I started making plans to come back.

  The second time I went into Mindland, it was a mess. I didn’t understand the rules. I didn’t know how to guide my mind without my body there to slow it down. I didn’t realize that, the first time, Dr. Bishop had been guiding me. This time, I was on my own.

  I walked out the same door that led me to the back of the bowling alley and onto the same Mediterranean field with all the gatekeepers of Western thought. Almost instantly, I was yanked out of there, like I’d been jerked off the stage by an old vaudevillian hook. I couldn’t find a way to settle into a time and place. The wind started swirling, kicking up dirt and dust in the field around me. The horizon was lost in the haze. Voices, sounds, images replaced the dirt and dust. They formed into a dozen or so dust devils. Or, more specifically, tiny, ethereal tornadoes composed not of physical detritus but of brands, logos, sound bites, and the like. They grew and crashed into one another and me. It all accelerated to dizzying speeds.

  I closed my eyes and tried to think. How had Dr. Bishop guided me? First, she sent me to familiar places. The ancients. Exactly what I’d expect in Mindland. But it had made sense. A real sense. More concrete than a dream sense. And how do we make sense of the chaos outside of Mindland, outside of dreams?

  Stories. The first thing I had to do was to put this chaos around me into a story. A narrative I could follow. Even if I didn’t have my physical body to move me through things, a story had a structure I could understand. It would slow things down and keep things in order long enough for me to negotiate it all. And so I told myself the story of what was happening as it happened.

  I’m in a maelstrom surrounded by clutter and pop culture dust devils. I’m metaphysical so I can’t get hurt. I can open my eyes. As soon as I did, the dust devils spread out. They didn’t go away, but they gave me room. I looked to the tortured ground, the torn posters and magazine advertisements and broken toasters and blenders and plastic toy packaging that had drifted down from the dust devils and now carpeted the once green grass. The clutter was no deeper than a fine falling snow, so I could walk across it. I started walking away from the cottage door. A dust devil steered a staggering path toward me. I stopped to see what it might be up to. It circled me once, tipped its open mouth toward me as if to try to suck me into the funnel. When I stayed rooted to the ground, it backed away four or five feet and rose straight up another three feet. A pair of woman’s legs slid out of the bottom. Her feet were adorned with clunky black shoes. White tights stretched to her knees. The dust devil gradually rose, leaving not only the legs but a black, schoolgirl skirt to wrap around the legs, an exposed midriff, the bottom half of a uniform blouse tied into a knot just above the midriff, the rest of the blouse barely covering an apparently surgically-enhanced breast, and, finally, the head of a young woman. She looked vaguely familiar, but if pressed to come up with a name, I would not have been able to do it. She took one step toward me and lifted a finger with a blood red painted fingernail to a pair of lips made up in the same shade of blood red. “Well,” she said.

  I could not comprehend why, of all the detritus swirling around, she was the most prominent, the one to be deposited in front of me. I gave her a slight nod and tried to look beyond her, through the dust and trash toward something more meaningful.

  She said, “Do you want to see me naked?”

  “It’s not that I don’t,” I said, suddenly concerned about whether or not I hurt this young woman’s feelings. “I’m sure you’re very attractive in your own right. It’s just that, I didn’t come here to see you naked. I came for other things.”

  She glanced down at her clunky shoe, twisted her foot as if she were extinguishing a cigarette, and looked back up at me, all with her finger still next to her mouth. She raised her eyebrows. “Do you want to hear me sing?”

  “No!” I said, responding faster and more forcefully than I should have, if I really were trying to keep from hurting her feelings. At the moment, not hearing her music was more important.

  The storm of dust devils spread further back. A bit of sunlight cracked through the cluttered air. Masses of people started to gather at the fringes. Music emerged from somewhere. A standard, repetitive, synthesized beat. She was going to sing. I could find no way to stop her or the music, but I desperately wanted to.

&n
bsp; At that point, I had enough. Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz screaming for her dog Toto, I called out for Clint Dempsey.

  This thrust me back into the hallway of the cottage. A little yellow light glowed above a doorway. I walked through. It led me down the steps again, back into the basement of the Williams Building. There, I entered a locker room. A handful of young men, mostly mid-to-late twenties, all lean and wiry, wearing the whites of the Fulham Football Club. They strapped on cleats and stretched their hamstrings one last time and took tiny sips of water and stared at the concrete and prepared for a game. Clint Dempsey—the soccer player, not the dog—sat among them. “Today,” he told himself. “Today, I’m going to score. Today, I’m going to shoot every chance I get. Today, I’ll score a hat trick.” He stared at his cleats and repeatedly visualized what it would take, how John Terry and the Chelsea defense would be there, doing everything they could to keep Clint Dempsey off the ball, to keep the ball out of the net. And Clint Dempsey visualized the angles he would take to beat Terry to the ball, the moves he would use to elude the defense, the way his left leg would travel through the path of the ball with such force that it would bring his whole body with him and he’d fly through the shot and land again on his left foot.

  I eavesdropped on Clint Dempsey’s thoughts for a second or two before I indulged in my own visualizations. I realized that just by hollering out a name, I could slide into that person’s mind, his situations and thoughts. That’s how I’d found out about Dr. Bishop’s cancer. That’s how I witnessed Clint Dempsey’s obsession. That’s how I could figure out…

  I started to call out Frank Walters’ name. I got halfway through the Frank before I recognized how intelligent the guy was, what a formidable opponent. I’d need to sharpen my skills before encountering Walters in Mindland. So I picked a weaker mind. I called out, “Connor Jarred.”

  This thrust me into a scene I wasn’t quite ready for because I hadn’t accounted for time. I hadn’t done the math. I could wander around Clint Dempsey’s conscious mind because he was in England, which is nine hours ahead of California, so my middle-of-the-night cottage hours coincided with his late morning preparations for an early afternoon game. Ape Man was in the same time zone as me. His mind was unconscious, deep into a dream. Maybe nightmare would be a better word.

  I found myself standing atop a ruffled sleeping bag inside a canvas, four-person tent. The faint glow of a dying campfire flickered against the front flap. A small kerosene lantern lit the rest of the scene. A large man lay on a coarse army surplus blanket. His navy blue shorts gathered in a bunch around his right ankle. He propped himself up on one elbow. His other hand cradled his belly fat, holding it away from his groin, making room for the head of the young boy that bobbed up and down there. Most of the boy’s face was obscured by his mop of red hair. This kid couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven. The Maori tattoo was lacking, but the face was unmistakable just the same.

  Besides that, I was in this kid’s thoughts. Just as I’d eavesdropped on Clint Dempsey’s obsessions and was able to visualize Clint Dempsey’s visualizations, I shared this kid’s terror. I traced his thoughts as they searched for a way out of this tent and into the high desert that surrounded it and back to the dirt road that would lead to a main road that would take him eventually to a highway and home. I felt his sense of futility. I felt the intensity of the moment for him, down to the last detail: the erection that filled his mouth and the bush of pubic hair that tickled his nose and the hand that slapped the back of his head if it stopped bobbing.

  The large man let go of his belly and reached around for the boy’s thigh and yanked down the boy’s plaid bermudas. The kid’s flaccid member hung in front of his hairless scrotum. The large man licked his forefinger and used it to rub tiny circles around the boy’s sphincter. This gave the boy an almost instant erection. He started to cry.

  I had enough. I called out, “Get me out of this place!”

  Luckily, it worked. I landed back in my little footlocker in the RW Winfield one-lane bowling alley.

  28

  The third time I went to Mindland, I just goofed off. I’d known before going in that I could sneak into other people’s minds and snoop around. It even occurred to me that I could make suggestions in these people’s minds and maybe they’d follow those suggestions, just like Dr. Bishop had apparently been doing in my mind when she convinced me to sell her fake secrets to Walters. During the day that separated my second trip and my third, I sat in my office at the psych hospital, winding up the spring on my toy bird, watching its beak inch a breath away from the desktop, then perform a back flip. I thought of all the possibilities. A sense of power ballooned in my chest. Every time I tried to pop it, the power balloon healed itself and re-inflated. The third trip, I figured, had to be just for fun.

  When I emerged from the footlocker, I hollered, “Rip Van Winkle,” and almost immediately found myself on a bench in front of a hotel. The sign above the hotel showed a painting of King George III, but on his head was the blue tricorn hat of an American Revolutionary, and in his hand was a sword. Faint shadows of a scepter bled through the paint under the sword. Under this portrait, the words “George Washington” had been painted. The hotel, I knew from reading Irving’s story a thousand times, was Mr. Doolittle’s inn. Any minute now, Rip would be along. At least that’s what I hoped.

  The Kaatskill mountains rose above the town in the distance. A veil of gray clouds settled atop their peaks. The waning sunlight cast shades of blue and purple along the ridges of the mountains. The rest of the sky glistened, bathed in gold. The shadows and magical hues struck me as somehow fake, touched up in an unsettling vibrancy designed to cast me into a world adjacent to my own.

  Subtle details set me further off kilter. A tar sidewalk shone through the straw and pine needles at my feet; the bench beneath me was covered in a thick layer of varnish that I doubt existed in the 18th century. Small electric lights lined the walking path to my left. A brown trashcan sat alongside a green trashcan bearing the three arrows that indicated its role as a home for recyclables. Even Mr. Doolittle’s inn cast an electric candle light on an ancient Budweiser sign.

  Rip emerged amid this blend of authenticity and anachronism. He bore the same contradictory markings of the scene around him. While he looked like a flesh and blood person, something about him was off. He appeared more like an aging theme park employee than an 18th century farmer. His clothes were made of cotton and synthetic fibers. Makeup rather than burst blood vessels reddened his nose. He was getting up there in the years, though, and his beard was real. He yawned.

  I looked into his thoughts, but nothing came out.

  “That won’t work here,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Mind reading. You can do it with real people here, but I’m not real.”

  I looked at Rip. He looked as real as anything else. Dust settled into the coarse fibers of his coat. Rust flaked off his fowling gun. That sweet stench of body odor floated between us. I reached out for the one spot that seems to be fair game for contact: his shoulder. I patted it. The muscles and dirt and oil under my fingers felt like muscles and dirt and oil. I said, “What do you mean, you’re not real?”

  “I’m a myth,” Rip said. “I don’t generate thoughts. I just absorb the ones you give me.”

  “Can you still answer questions?”

  “I can give it a shot.”

  Mr. Doolittle emerged from his inn, carrying a ceramic jug. He nodded to Rip and me. I nodded back. Rip held out his arms for the jug. Mr. Doolittle passed it along. He sat on the lacquered bench, next to Rip. He pulled out a stick and started whittling. A dusky orange light sprinkled his knife’s blade. Rip took a pull off the jug.

  “How did you become a myth?”

  “Well, you know, the story is an old one. You can mine Chinese or Jewish legend and find stories about guys sleeping for decades and coming back to find everything changed. Irving got his story from a German folk
tale. I’m just one more rewriting of that legend.”

  “No. You’re different than that,” I said. Because I’d studied all of those Eastern legends at the university. I knew the difference between old myths and new ones. “I don’t think you ever slept longer than ten or twelve hours in your life.”

  “How can you say that? I’m Rip Van Winkle.”

  “Look at the facts: you and your wife didn’t get along, you were having affairs all over town…”

  Rip stopped me with a mischievous smile. “Are you sure of that?”

  “I’m pretty sure. That’s what Washington Irving seems to be telling me.”

  Rip shrugged. A corner of his lip raised, pushing up his crackling skin, compacting the stage makeup on the ball of his cheek. He said, “Irving?”

  I felt somehow part of a performance and like I’d just missed my cue. I thought back to the story and thought about Irving’s sly remarks about Rip’s infidelities. This reminded me that Irving didn’t tell the tale at all. Diedrich Knickerbocker did. Or at least Irving claimed to find the story among Knickerbocker’s papers. And, come to think of it, Irving didn’t claim that so much as Geoffrey Crayon, the fictional author of The Sketch Book, did. So where did that leave me? With a fictional narrator calling up a fictional narrator to tell the story adapted from ancient legend and a German folktale into new American mythology and my mind in Mindland trying to make sense of it. I was thrown.

  Rip shook me out of this. He said, “Go on.”

  “Okay.” I shifted my focus back to the story. “So you and your wife didn’t get along, you may or may not have been having affairs all around town, you weren’t interested in working or raising your kids, and a war that seemed to have nothing to do with you was slowly brewing. So you wandered off. You skipped out on the war and the childrearing. You showed back up in town the week after your wife died and just in time to be a grandfather. Sounds to me like the classic case of a deadbeat dad.”