Madhouse Fog

by Sean Carswell

  “Would you really want to?” I asked.

  “Of course. Everyone wants to rule the world.”

  “I don’t,” I said.

  “You’re lying to yourself. You think you could do all this good. You think you could end starvation and create a more egalitarian society. You have all kinds of visions. Everyone does. And anyone who gets the chance to run it all will take it.”

  “I disagree,” I said. “I just don’t see where the joy would be in running things.”

  Frank Walters reached across the table, placed his hand on the cold wood. He grabbed his cane and swung it around him. He hit no obstacle. “Where are you?” he asked, out loud. “How did you get into my house?”

  I took this as my cue to get the hell out of Frank Walters’ mind.

  I had made a big mistake. I tried to put a thought into Walters’ head that he wasn’t capable of generating himself. He had to know I’d been inside, which meant that he was only one or two inductive leaps away from realizing that Dr. Bishop had not only found a way into Mindland, she’d shown me how to get there, too. And so, there Frank Walters sat, eating his strawberry cheesecake ice cream and enjoying the moment before he laid down his major threat.

  I took one more stab at disarming him. I said, “Do you ever watch movies about time machines?”

  “I don’t watch movies.”

  Which surprised me. Of course, he couldn’t watch movies, but even people who can see don’t just watch movies. They listen to them, too. But I guess for a guy like Walters, if he’s going to listen to something, he’ll listen to something that doesn’t rely so heavily on visuals, like an audio book or something. So I changed my tack a bit. I said, “It’s not just movies. There are books about time machines, too. And all of the stories about them wrestle with the same problems: if you’re going to go back in time, you’re going to change the present and perhaps even change it so much that you yourself will no longer exist. Or they talk about the problems of time and space being linked together. And so on. But there’s one thing that they never seem to come right out and acknowledge: that there can be only one time machine.”

  Walters played along. He asked, “How do you mean?”

  “If there’s one time machine, you can go back in time and change things and make them better for yourself in the future, maybe. Or you can go back and place bets on sporting events that you know the outcome of. Or whatever. But if I have a time machine, too, I can go back and undo anything that you did. And if there are five or ten or a hundred time machines, then everyone would be going back and changing things and undoing what’s been undone and the world would become so unstable that it would be unrecognizable.”

  “Okay,” Walters said. “That makes sense.”

  A shaggy dog that was not Clint Dempsey and that had no visible master came up to me and sniffed my knee. I ran my fingers around his neck, searching for a collar. I didn’t feel one. I set my ice cream cup on the ground near the bench. The dog dug his nose into the ice cream. I fought the urge to ask Walters about my dog.

  “So you see what I’m saying?” I asked.

  “I have no idea what you’re doing. You’re acting very brazen for a man as vulnerable as you are. You’re buying ice cream and talking about time machines and wasting my time.”

  “No, this is about you,” I said. “It’s about the elephant sitting on this bench between us.”

  “Lola?” Walters asked. “Is Lola the elephant?”

  I knew what he was up to—playing with my biggest fear, poking my most sensitive area. I volleyed that shot right back at him and said, “No. The elephant is not your nephew Connor, either.”

  This took Walters aback for a split second. He flinched. Then he said, “I’ll bite. Explain what you’re thinking.”

  I rubbed the dog’s neck. He kept licking the scoop of ice cream. I didn’t add anything to my time machine discussion. Maybe my hint was too vague for Walters. Maybe he couldn’t follow the same thought process I’d followed. After all, he’d never been in my mind. Not like I’d been in his. So perhaps he couldn’t make the inductive leap that I’d made: that the path into Mindland is like a time machine. It can only work if no more than one person can go in. A second person could keep undoing what the first person had done. More than two people would lead to way too much instability.

  And if the second person wanted to use that technology to become immensely powerful, he’d need to eliminate the first person.

  The second person in this scenario would be Frank Walters and the first person, of course, would be me.

  Surely, at some level, Walters knew this. He knew that he’d have to kill me if he wanted to pull off any of his plans. At some level, he had to know that I knew this. I didn’t explain myself to Walters. I just watched the dog lick the empty cup at my feet.

  Walters finished his ice cream, set the cup on the bench next to him, and patted my knee. “Anyway,” he said. “I just wanted to let you know that I know. Dr. Bishop found a way in. She showed it to you. And you crept into my mind just like she tried to.”

  I nodded but didn’t say anything.

  Walters waited a beat and added, “And I want you to know that I’ll stop at nothing to find out what you know.”

  “Hell,” I said. “You didn’t need to come all the way up here just to tell me that.”

  30

  Before there was an Ape Man, there was a twelve-year-old boy named Connor Jarred struggling through an awkward adolescence made more awkward by his parents’ misbehavior. His mother had begun having an affair with a landscaper who lived in Costa Mesa. She’d visit the landscaper in the early afternoons, shortly after picking up Connor at school. She’d stop at an ice cream shop, buy Connor a sundae or a banana split, and leave him in her Mercedes station wagon while she whiled away an hour in the landscaper’s half of a duplex. Connor knew exactly what they were doing in there. He may have been twelve, but he’d been introduced to sex. He’d come across a stash of magazines in the closet of his father’s den and spent several hours studying every page; he’d stumbled across a box of pornographic betamax videotapes at a Santa Ana swap meet, paid ten bucks for the bundle, and set up his parents’ old betamax player in his bedroom; he’d further benefited from late-night cable. So, although Connor knew little about depths of emotion and complexities inherent in the act, he was aware of the basic mechanics—or at least how they’re performed for a camera—and of the basic lies told to engage in those acts. He said nothing to anyone and ate his ice cream.

  Despite Connor’s silence, his father was not unaware of his wife’s infidelities. He was prevented from taking the higher ground on extramarital affairs, however, as long as he continued to pay the rent on his girlfriend’s apartment in Santa Ana. He could take the higher ground when it came to his son, who was becoming more and more of a disappointment to him every day. Not only was Connor a goofy kid with all his freckles and his mop of red hair cut short in the front and dangling down to his shoulders in back and his awkward limbs gotten more gangly from a recent growth spurt, but all the damn ice cream had taken him beyond the point of pudgy that could be stretched out when he shot up taller. Plus the whiteheads were bubbling up on the surface of Connor’s skin like a pox. Connor’s father did what he thought was best for his son. He started picking Connor up from school and leaving him in the car outside a Santa Ana apartment building.

  Waiting out his father’s infidelities was worse for Connor than waiting out his mother’s. The lack of ice cream was far from the chief consideration. His parents’ unraveling marriage wasn’t even the problem. As Connor would learn in the subsequent years, the ball of hate that held his parents together was far too large to ever unravel completely. Extramarital affairs were like foreplay to them. What really bothered the twelve-year-old Connor on those Santa Ana afternoons was the neighborhood he’d been dropped in. Waiting in the car with the windows rolled up and the doors locked was not an option. The first time he’d tried that, a group of local kid
s had kicked at the passenger door, taunting Connor, shaking the car, and leaving the door panel looking like a relief map of the moon. Connor’s father would not stand for it. He told Connor, “I don’t care how many of them there are. Next time, you get off your ass and fight for yourself and my car.” When Connor resisted this suggestion, his father added, “If you don’t, I’ll make your face look like my car door.”

  So Connor learned to fight, usually against older kids, usually two or three of them at a time. He burned off the ice cream weight of his mother’s affairs in a barrage of side-armed punches and fistfuls of hair. Gradually, he learned how to straighten his punches, twist his wrist at impact to tear the skin of his opponent. He learned weak points and the power of kicking and holds that would cause others to submit. He also learned that the fights could be endless. Every day. If the neighborhood kids didn’t come to him outside his father’s girlfriend’s apartment, he’d go to them, wandering up the hill to the park behind the middle school, finding groups of three or four kids in their school uniforms, finding any pretense to drag grass stains onto their blue polyester pants, to spread blood—his or theirs, it didn’t matter—on to those button-up, short sleeve white shirts. It usually ended with Connor curled up on the grass, absorbing a flurry of kicks from black patent leather shoes.

  This was where I came in. Or, at least a twelve-year-old version of me, looking strikingly like a thirty-seven-year-old version of me, only smaller.

  I walked through the smog of a Santa Ana afternoon, across the speckled browns and greens of the park, among smatterings of bald white men with sleeve tattoos and forties of Mickeys malt liquor and adolescents in school uniforms and skateboarders grinding the edge of a low wall and empty concrete park benches and pick-up basketball games where the players lacked the definitive element of nets to determine whether or not the ball really had gone through the hoop. Three kids formed a half-circle around Connor. He held his fists just above his eye level and kept his forearms high, having learned that it’s quicker and easier to drop your arms to protect your stomach than to raise them to protect your head. I stepped into the middle of the circle before the first punch was thrown. I looked first at the three kids gathered around Connor and said, “You’ll fight another day, guys.”

  To Connor’s amazement, they actually listened to me, gradually backing away until they felt it was safe to turn and walk off. Connor stayed in fighting position. I pointed at a white Jaguar with a fully repaired passenger door panel as it drove down the side street adjacent to the park. The right turn signal began to blink. Connor watched the car swing onto a main street that led to the freeway. It was not the first time his father had abandoned Connor in Santa Ana. Typically, he would then have to find a pay phone, call his mom, and fight all comers in the park until his mom arrived, usually an hour later.

  Connor dropped his arms. “I gotta call my mom,” he said.

  “Come with me,” I said.

  Connor followed. We strolled past the gang of skins and their huge bottles of Mickeys, past the skateboarders, past the school kids. Though all three groups had approached Connor before, though he’d fought all of them and lost and lived to fight them and lose to them again, none of the groups cast him so much as a glance while he walked with me. Connor kept his hackles up.

  I led him out of the park and down the hill toward the main drag. The neighborhood was alive with people lifting weights in their front yard or buried under the hoods of their sputtering American cars or digging weeds out of a tiny tomato patch or scattering feed into the cages of fighting roosters in that unique blend of rural leftovers and urban main dish that Connor never tasted in the repeating cul-de-sacs of his Irvine housing development.

  I pointed toward the tiny yard in front of a square yellow house thick with stucco, shaded by a red tile roof. Two black and tan Lakeland terriers ran up to the chainlink fence bordering the sidewalk. They faced us and their mouths yapped, but no sound came from them. I leaned against the bus stop bench, facing the terriers. Connor fell in line next to me. We both watched the silent yapping mouths.

  “According to the story I heard,” I said, “these dogs barked so much at bus riders that their owners had their voice boxes removed.”

  Connor stared at the dogs. They struggled to bark and failed to produce any sound that could be heard over the scraping of metal and concrete from the skateboarders, the sounds of basketballs rattling off backboards, the rumbling of nine million cars chugging through this mass of Southern California sprawl. “Why didn’t any of those guys fight you?” Connor finally asked.

  “If you genuinely want power, you don’t fight,” I told him. “No one in power fights. You either get someone else to fight for you, or you think your way out of a situation.”

  Connor looked around this neighborhood so foreign to him. “Who around here would fight for me?”

  “No one.”

  “So what am I supposed to do?”

  “Think,” I said. I shook my thumb in the general direction of the bus stop sign behind me. It glistened like a white pebble on a full-moon night. “Think, why should I fight for territory if I could just leave it? Think about Hansel and Gretel, how they found their way out of the woods. If they had been able to stick to stones, they never would’ve had to fight the witch. And you don’t even need the stones. You have bus signs on every block. They’re set in concrete. No birds will peck them away. You can forever follow them back to Irvine.”

  Connor’s glance pinballed from the silent dogs to me to the approaching OCTA bus. He said no more than the terriers. I handed him a dollar. “Give this to the bus driver and ask her how to get back home. She’ll guide you.”

  Connor took the dollar. I wandered off.

  When the bus finally dropped him off down the block from his house, his father’s Jaguar and his mother’s Mercedes were parked in the driveway. He unlocked the front door and walked into a chorus of groans and dirty talk. Apparently, his father’s affairs reminded his mother that she’d always gone for the bad boys. Connor sat among the sounds of sex feeling like the bouncy red gym ball that his parents flung at each other in a game with rules he couldn’t understand. He wished he were back at the Santa Ana park, throwing arms at whoever would fight him.

  Of course, there were problems with this memory that I’d stuck in the Ape Man’s mind. The biggest of these being that I didn’t know Connor when he was twelve years old, and five hundred miles separated my Folsom adolescence from his Santa Ana afternoons. These problems didn’t concern me, though. Human memory is fickle and malleable. Our imagination fills the gaps that reason can’t reconcile. I knew that all I had to do was gather enough of the fragments hidden in the dusky closets of Ape Man’s unconscious to create a story that he’d believe. And it was important to insert myself in the story. To show Ape Man not only that I’d done good deeds for him in the past, but that I could be trusted. I could help him, even.

  For my purposes, the facts of the past were insignificant compared to the story I could make him believe about it. And, if I’m going to be honest about this, my motives weren’t strictly calculated. I wanted to torment him. I wanted him to feel the pain that I felt every time my left hand ached to toss a ball for Clint Dempsey. So I fed him this memory. I made sure the kids he fought were white and that he lost to them every time and that I was the only person who could save him.

  I planted this memory in his head so that he’d trust me because I’m as flawed and prone to petty schemes as the rest of my species. And because that asshole either killed my dog or took him and wouldn’t give him back.

  31

  I stopped by Lola’s apartment unexpected and caught her painting. I hadn’t seen much of her process, but apparently she liked to work on several paintings at once. Some canvases were stretched on the floor, some half-finished but hanging on the wall, and five standing on easels with no stools in front. The apartment was tiny, three hundred square feet at most, and that included the kitchen, bathroom, and closet
. It looked cluttered at first. A second glance showed that it wasn’t cluttered at all. Everything was set up for maximum movement between paintings. Nothing that wasn’t used for painting lived in the apartment. There wasn’t even a chair to sit on.

  Lola squatted over the canvas on the floor in the posture of a little kid inspecting an anthill. She smiled up to me but didn’t stop painting. “What’s up?” she asked.

  I never came by Lola’s apartment. I typically let it be her space. But on this day, I wanted to deal with something before it became a problem. There was an ethical gray area shadowing me. It had to do with Lola and Dr. Benengeli. I’d become friends with Dr. Benengeli at the same time that Lola and I had become lovers, but the relationships were mutually exclusive. The three of us hadn’t spent time together since that long-ago afternoon of finger painting on psych hospital picnic tables. I wanted to change that.

  I told her that I had tickets to go down to Los Angeles that weekend and see a production of Waiting for Godot. “A big hospital donor’s son is the director,” I said. “When she called to tell me about it, I bought tickets.”

  “How much did she donate to the hospital?”

  “Enough for the hospital to buy out all the seats for the entire run of the play and not miss the money. But that’s not how charities work.”

  Lola bit her lip and stared down. She was clearly thinking. I doubted her thoughts were about the play or the donor. She looked at her paintbrush. She stood, walked to a canvas on the wall, and worked that color into the scene. As she did this, she said, “You should take Dr. Benengeli.”

  “We can. I have four tickets.”

  Lola kept painting. “You know it’s a two-hour play where nothing happens, don’t you?”

  “I read it,” I said. “I’ve never seen it.”