Rip drank from his jug and shrugged. “You have your story and I have mine. And it doesn’t matter. Everyone will believe Knickerbocker over you.”
Mr. Doolittle stopped whittling long enough to pat Rip’s knee, then turned his attention back to his knife and stick. Slivers of wood gathered at his feet.
“Don’t get me wrong. I’m not judging you,” I said. “I just want to know how you did it. Any careful reading of your story paints you as a drunk, a lousy father, maybe even an adulterer and a draft dodger. Yet, you’re one of the most popular figures in American culture. We teach our kids to love you. How did that happen?”
Rip waved his hand at the scene in front of me. The sun sat perched upon the Kaatskills in the exact spot it was when we began this conversation, promising a perpetual sunset and a night that would never come. “Look at this world you created for me,” Rip said. “You wanted to meet me in the 18th century, but you have no idea what it looks like. So where do you stick me? Frontierland?”
“I didn’t stick you here.”
“Whose mind are we in?”
I shrugged, genuinely lost in my search for an answer to that question. I said, “Go on.”
“Okay, well, you go around looking for authenticity and you may or may not be looking for it in Frontierland. You look for the real Rip Van Winkle, but I’m a fictional character, a hodgepodge of everything that’s come before me. And you just pick one moment in my evolution: Knickerbocker’s story. You forget that I’ve been turned into a cartoon. I’m the hero of a kid’s story. I’m a myth. Just like all myths, I’m always changing.”
“But you’re also Rip Van Winkle. Washington Irving created you. He gave you a name and stuck you in America. It was written. You can’t change the words now.”
Rip offered the jug to me. A sticky drip of brown streaked its side. I declined. “Your loss,” he said. He drank a little more. Ale residue stained his gray and black beard. “Don’t get too hung up on words on a page. They’re just an illusion of permanence. What power do they have over a Disney cartoon?”
I scratched my chin and looked up at the King George/George Washington painting above Rip. I raised my eyebrows and thought for a second. My plan had been to visit Rip first and Don Quixote second. Staring at the liver spots and dust-caked wrinkles of Rip’s hands, thinking of the Frontierland I’d created and of Rip’s last statement deflated me. I wanted to head back to my footlocker.
Rip jerked me out of my escape before I had a chance to make it. He added, “Anyway, we’re just dancing around the real point here.”
“Which is what?” I asked.
“Why are you trying to learn how to become what I’ve become?”
“What’s that?”
“A loveable bastard.”
Mr. Doolittle laughed from his end of the bench. It was a quick laugh, done almost before he started. The rich Kaatskill forests swallowed most of the sounds around us. All I could hear was Doolitttle’s whittling. Slip, slip, slip.
Starting with the fourth time I journeyed into Mindland, I stopped goofing off. I got right down to business.
29
I sat at a table in the nicest downtown restaurant wearing, for the first time in my life, a suit that had not been purchased for me by a parent. Sure, Lola had picked it out and it had come off the rack at a department store, but it had been tailored to fit me right and I finally figured out a way to wear a suit without thinking the whole time, goddamn it, I’m wearing a suit. The director of one of the largest endowments in the nation sat across the table from me. Our business was done. His endowment would fund the Alzheimer’s research at the hospital for another two or three years, at least. He’d even given me contacts to secure genuine embryonic stem cells for the research. Nothing was left but for him to finish his coffee and his story. I couldn’t help feeling big time.
The endowment director told me about his mother, who’d recently died. She’d been in the awkward position of being a very healthy octogenarian when Alzheimer’s took over. Her final five years had been marked by the torturous decline of her mind while her body worked just fine. “I used to wonder which would be worse: having your body give out on you while your mind is fine or having your mind go while your body is still relatively healthy,” the endowment director told me. “Now I know.”
I closed my eyes, gave a quick nod, and lifted my glance back up to meet his. Unlike my suit and tie, my sympathy was no façade. I meant it. I felt closer to the healthy body, diseased mind than this guy could possibly imagine. Every time I climbed back out of Mindland, I felt like I was snapping out of some kind of madness. My drive to fund the battle against mental illnesses and manias and delusions went beyond altruism. I was starting to feel like I had a personal stake in them.
The endowment director finished his coffee and checked his watch. I looked outside the restaurant window at the image seated on the downtown bench. He’d been haunting me for the past ten minutes or so. At first, I’d hoped he was a ghost, a delusion, a construct of a guilty conscience. As time wore on, though, I was able to steal enough glances at that downtown bench to recognize that no phantom sat there. It was the flesh and blood Frank Walters.
The endowment director offered to drive me back to the psych hospital. This was out of character for a guy like the endowment director, but not out of character for this particular guy. Even though he oversaw a foundation that handled more money than many small countries have, even though he himself had the kind of wealth that few Americans can really conceive of, he was a lonely guy. He needed to hang out with someone. For some reason, he liked to hang out with me. I’d run into him a few weeks earlier while doing business with one of his assistants. The director and I happened to start chatting about soccer—the 2006 World Cup, in fact, and Clint Dempsey’s goal—and we strangely hit it off. Next thing I knew we were doing lunch, the hospital was getting funded, and I’d finally found a friend who would talk to me about soccer. It was a good situation. “I appreciate the offer,” I said, “but I have a little business to take care of while I’m in town.”
The director nodded and shook my hand. I thanked him again for his generosity and told him I’d be in touch soon. We parted ways in front of the restaurant. As he turned the corner down California Street, I lingered on Main. I waited for him to take another turn into the parking lot halfway down California. Then, I sat down on the bench next to Frank Walters.
“Fancy meeting you here,” Walters said.
Early on, this would have been unsettling. I would have wondered how this blind man knew it was me. Could he smell me? Did he know the sound of my walk well enough to recognize it out of a crowd of hundreds on this downtown street? Did he have some kind of sixth sense?
By now, though, I knew Walters well enough to see how his tricks worked. He knew it was me who sat down on the bench because no one else would sit next to an impeccably dressed blind man on a downtown bench at 1:30 on a Tuesday afternoon. He also knew to say perfectly vague things that a stranger would not think odd but I would think were directed specifically at me, like, “Fancy meeting you here.”
“Just happened to be in the neighborhood,” I said.
“I was banking on that.”
Of course he was. Walters’ time was money in the bank. It may not have been the big money that the endowment director had, but money is relative. It means different things to different people. Walters had a lot of money relative to what I had. And the amount of money Walters had was not enough relative to the amount of money he wanted. The fact that he’d spend an hour in the middle of his workday—time when he could have been making more of that money he wanted—to drive up here, wait outside a restaurant for me for another quarter of an hour, and know that he had another half-hour to drive home all meant that he was banking no small sum on meeting me. The fact that he’d left Ape Man in the car, the fact that he came armed with nothing more than his wits and his voice meant that he was serious about something. I ran all of this through my mind, but
I said nothing. Let him listen for my breath just to make sure I’m still here.
“Well, I can see that you’re a busy man. You want me to get right down to business.”
“Nah,” I said. “I’m not that busy. My work for today is done. I don’t even have to go back to the office.”
“Congratulations on the endowment.”
Again, this was exactly the kind of thing that would’ve thrown me when I first met Walters. I would have wondered how much he knew about the endowment, what his connections were, what his abilities were to kill the deal, all of that. I would have slid into a quick, paranoid panic and given him a few seconds of upper hand. Not on this day, though. This day was all about trying to keep him unsettled. I said, “You know, I think I’m going to celebrate with an ice cream. Do you want an ice cream?”
“I’ll pass.”
I stood. “I am going to get an ice cream. Would you like to come with me?”
“I’ll pass.”
“Okay, well, I’m going to head over there. If you’re still here when I get back, we’ll have a chat. But, please, don’t feel like you have to wait for me.”
Walters’ lips got tense. He tightened his grip on his cane. He said nothing. He only nodded.
I walked over to the next block and went into the ice cream shop. A bored young woman who looked to be a year or two out of high school stood behind the counter. I paused for a second to question what I was doing in this shop, knowing that I had just eaten and didn’t need more food, knowing that my stomach couldn’t handle a scoop of ice cream anymore, anyway. But my imagination had conjured an image and it was worth eight bucks to make that image a reality. I ordered two cups of ice cream.
While the young woman wordlessly doled out the scoops, I took a moment to collect my thoughts. I wondered how Walters really knew where I’d be today. I decided to settle on the simplest solution first. That’s what my time lingering in the minds of others was teaching me: usually the most direct solution to a problem is the right one. Take Walters’ suits, for example. How did he dress like that? It had seemed like such a mystery to me that a blind man could be so impeccably dressed. So I looked into it. As it turns out, Walters had worked out a deal with a costume designer in Hollywood. Walters set the costume designer up with work in commercials, the costume designer kicked back suits to Walters. And who dressed him? Well, I’d actually witnessed it one morning in Mindland. I saw Ape Man select a suit, take it out of the plastic from the cleaners, and pass it over to Walters. While Walters put on his pants and shirt, Ape Man tied a tie around his own neck. He then loosened the tie, took it off, slid it over Walters’ head, and tightened it. The whole scene was strangely touching: the intimacy of monsters.
So back to how Walters knew where I’d be. Well, the most direct solution would be that he probably called the administrative assistant who worked in my department and asked where I was. She would’ve told him. She would’ve had no reason not to.
I paid the ice cream girl and tipped her a buck and walked back down the block to where Frank Walters sat impatiently on a bench.
I sat next to him again. “I know you said you’d pass, but I got you a cup of ice cream anyway,” I said. “It’s strawberry cheesecake.”
Walters took the cup of ice cream I handed him. He even spooned out a bite. And this was the image I had. I wanted Walters to have an ice cream in his hand while he tried to sound so tough laying down his threats. At least this was the best I could do to realize the image I’d had. Really, I wanted him to be licking an ice cream cone when he delivered his threats but giving an ice cream cone to an impeccably dressed blind man seemed cruel. I didn’t want to be cruel. I wanted to be disarming.
So I spooned my ice cream and Walters spooned his. We sat side by side on a downtown bench. I wore my suit and tie. Walters wore his. A middle-aged blond man rode past on a beach cruiser. A group of scantily clad young women chatted outside a local boutique. A homeless guy across the street played accordion and sang. His open accordion case invited spare change. Passersby largely avoided the guy and his case. I tried not to act scared because, really, Walters terrified me. I’d known him long enough now to know that the little things about him that had intimidated me—the way he could maneuver so easily despite his sightlessness, the fact that he knew so much about my life—were insignificant compared to the big truth of who Walters really was.
I braced myself for his threat because I knew what he knew: that big things had gone down the night before in Mindland.
On my seventh trip, I set my sights on Walters. I climbed out of the footlocker and hollered, “Frank Walters,” and a dull yellow bulb lit above a doorway. I walked down the stairs into the basement of the Williams Building. That’s where I came face-to-face with complete darkness. No shadows, no hints of light in the corner, nothing for the pupils to expand wide enough to see, no difference between eyes open and eyes closed. Not only was there no light at all, there was a sense that there never had been light. This was my welcome into the world of Walters’ mind.
It cast me out of any kind of comfort zone. It was so different from my mind and thought processes because, of course, I can see, and most people who can see think in images, not words. When I think of, say, a chair, I don’t think of the word chair. I picture a chair in my mind. All of my thoughts start out this way. I add the words later. But for Walters, who had been blind since birth, images weren’t forthcoming. He thought in sounds, feelings, tastes, smells. Which we all do—we all think in sounds, feelings, tastes, and smells. But for Walters, he thought only in these ways. No visuals. So the absence of light wasn’t an emptiness. Far from it. Sounds designated spaces. Thoughts abounded. A whole world existed. It’s just that sight was absent from it.
For someone who has been able to see his whole life, this world was horrifying. After a second, I learned to calm down a bit and just go with it. As I became a little more comfortable with the darkness, something occurred to me. There was nothing wrong with my physical eyes. I was only blind through my metaphysical eyes, and only while I was in Walters’ mind. And if that was true for me—if my experiences through others’ minds in Mindland allowed me to sense exactly what they sensed—the same would be true for Walters. That is, if I could see, but I was blind in Walters’ mind, than the opposite should be true for Walters: if he was blind, he could still see through other people’s minds in Mindland. This must be why he wants an in to Mindland so bad. If he’s here, he can see.
I pushed that thought as far back in my mind as possible. I didn’t want to be the dick who kept a blind man from seeing. I wanted to be the guy who stopped a potential tyrant from imposing his will on the world. So I stayed focused to the task at hand.
I’d expected Walters to be asleep. It was after two in the morning. I didn’t bank on Walters being an insomniac. Maybe that would have made sense to me if I’d thought ahead. And I had thought ahead. I just hadn’t thought of everything. So Walters’ dreams eluded me. Instead, I followed Walters into his kitchen. I recognized his sense of space and knowledge of obstacles. I felt his arm reach out above the stove and feel for a teakettle. I felt the cool wooden handle of the teakettle. I felt him reach for a faucet and fill the kettle and place it on a burner and turn a handle and listen to the hiss of gas and the tearing sound of the gas igniting under the burner. I listened for him to lean back against an obstacle that must have been a kitchen island and wait for the whistle of the kettle and then make his tea, which he knew would be herbal by the smell of the jasmine leaves. When he sat at the kitchen table and blew the top of his tea, I interrupted his thoughts. I whispered, “Dr. Bishop’s research.” His mind took the cue.
He ran through the reports in his head and came back with the same correct conclusion: that the research had been falsified, that these efforts to falsify the research would only have taken place if the research had been working, if Dr. Bishop had found a way into the collective unconscious. He thought briefly of the money that could be made by inserting
advertisements into the collective unconscious. His mind then wandered back to his mug of tea.
I whispered again. “Daydream,” I told Walters. “It will relax you. Imagine that the grant writer is here at your table. Tell him your plans like it’s all a B-movie and you know that he’ll be erased from the film before you ride off to your heroic end.”
Walters broke into a smile. Of course, I couldn’t see it. I could only feel what Walters felt when his cheeks got light and the corners of his lips rose.
“It would make no sense to waste this technology on advertising,” Walters told the grant writer in his mind. “Why sell the path to power? Why sell it to anyone? If you can get in, money is easy enough to get.”
“How so?”
“You’re a grant writer. You know this. If you can make a good enough suggestion, people will give you money. You only focus on the wealthy, the ones who are looking to donate anyway. But think of how much money people like televangelists have pulled out of the pocketbooks of the poor. Imagine you’re me—a blind man. You could start The Frank Walters Institute for the Blind. Make it a for-profit corporation. Convince everyone to donate five or ten or twenty dollars to the institute.”
“You could do that,” I said. Because this had occurred to me. I had thought about sneaking into the endowment director’s head and making sure that the deal went through. I’d opted not to. I’d like to say that I’d opted not to out of some kind of moral high ground, but I can’t say that for certain. I probably just felt like the deal would go through anyway and pushing harder would likely quell things. Nothing kills a deal like a smack of desperation.
“You could do that and a whole lot more,” Walters told the imaginary and not-so imaginary me.
“Like what?”
“You could influence anyone you want. You could sneak into the minds of the media moguls and make, say, Rupert Murdoch do your bidding. You could influence the decisions of the president or various congressmen. You could place yourself on the boards of several large corporations and run them. You could donate a few hours a night to it and end up running the world.”
Madhouse Fog Page 24
