Madhouse Fog

by Sean Carswell

  “Not only does nothing happen in the first act, but the same nothing happens in the second act.”

  “You don’t have to go, if you don’t want.”

  Lola’s paintbrush dried out on the canvas on the wall. She went back to her palette and her canvas on the floor, squatting over it like she was building sandcastles. “I want to go,” she said. “I love the play. I just wanted to make sure you knew.”

  Four of us rode down to LA in Dr. Benengeli’s car. As soon as Lola and I got in the back seat, Dr. Benengeli went through the introduction. She said, “Lola, this is my partner, Marcela.”

  Marcela rode shotgun. Lola sat directly behind her. She smiled and scooted forward to shake Marcela’s hand. She asked, “What kind of partnership? Do you have a private practice or something?”

  I touched Lola’s shoulder gently, feeling the soft cotton shirt stretched tightly over the curve. I shook my head.

  Lola caught on. “Oh,” she said. “You’re a couple.” She pointed a forefinger at her temple and made a goofy noise that sounded somewhere between a gunshot and a Bronx salute. “And here all this time I thought Dr. Benengeli was moving in on my man.”

  “She is,” Marcela said.

  Dr. Benengeli smiled. She glanced at me through the rearview mirror and winked. “The both of us are.”

  “Stop, you two,” Lola said. “You’re going to get the poor guy excited.”

  I leaned back in my seat. So it was going to be that kind of night.

  Much of the ride down consisted of teasing me because I thought a play in Hollywood would be a fancy affair. I’d even started ironing a shirt. Lola loved this information. Dr. Benengeli and Marcela got a laugh out of it. Lola had told me that I was okay in what I was wearing, which was only a pair of Dickies and a long sleeve t-shirt with the name and logo of a punk rock record label on it. I wasn’t quite the hipster the three women in the car were. I was the only one who didn’t know that a playhouse in Hollywood would be more of a warehouse on a back street where I could pick up some crystal meth before the performance if I so chose, and where Dr. Benengeli would be sure to not only lock her car but put an anti-theft device on the steering wheel. Jokes at my expense stretched all the way down to Agoura Hills.

  Very early in the play, I had to stop myself from crying. It had nothing to do with the razzing I’d gotten on the ride down. I’d actually enjoyed that. It helped me understand something about therapeutic relationships. I’d figured something weird would hang in the air between Dr. Benengeli and Lola because Dr. Benengeli had run a couple of group therapy sessions that Lola attended. But there was nothing there. They acted perfectly natural with each other, about as free as I would act if I went to a play with the physical therapist who massaged my neck back into shape after I got whiplash.

  The tears trying to sneak their way out of my eyes had everything to do with the play. It was during a scene between the two main characters, Vladimir and Estragon. Vladimir asked Estragon if he’d read the Bible. Estragon admitted he’d only looked at the pictures, specifically the map. The pale blue of the Dead Sea was so beautiful. He thought they could’ve honeymooned there. Something about the wistfulness of the way the actor said it got me a little choked up.

  By the second act, all four of us seemed to be having a different experience with the play. Dr. Benengeli was fuming. She’d whispered to us between acts that the director had it all wrong, that the play was supposed to be funnier. Vladimir and Estragon should be clowns, she said. Like Laurel and Hardy, she said. “Not all sad and dramatic like they’re both goddamn Hamlet!” Her whisper to us sounded more like a stage whisper. A few other patrons shot a dagger or two in her direction.

  Lola wasn’t bothered by the way the actors took on the roles. She sat in her chair with her back rigid, leaning forward a little as if she wanted to scoot down right to the front edge of the stage and become a part of the show. Marcela wasn’t bothered, either. In fact, the performance relaxed her so much that she nestled into a long nap. And as for me, well, I was crying.

  It was a stifled, repressed cry. Slow, fat tears slipping out of ducts for the first time since I was a little kid. I couldn’t stop them. There was just something about Vladimir and Estragon—Didi and Gogo, as they call each other—that had so much familiarity behind them. The way they talked was a whole other form of communication. The words came out like caresses. The meaning of individual words wasn’t as important as the sense that the words hummed a kind reassurance, a kind of way of saying, “We share this life together. Whatever voids we face, whatever emptiness surrounds us, it’s okay. Even if life seems meaningless, your life means something to me.” Didi and Gogo showed love in the long term, which was something I never saw on stage or in books. Love stories are almost always about beginnings or endings. There’s never one right in the middle. Except for this one.

  I watched the two actors talk of nothing, talk of waiting, talk of leaving while staying still, talk of pain and desire. In a very sad way, it made me think of what I lost when my marriage ended: that comfort and caress that takes years—decades, lifetimes—to build. So there I was, the most absurd person in this Theater of the Absurd, crying in a production of Waiting for Godot.

  Maybe the worst part about it all was Frank Walters sitting in the back row, off to my right. The Ape Man sat next to him, keeping him apprised of each fat, pitiful tear.

  At least the drive home was more pleasant. Lola and Dr. Benengeli spent the time talking about the actor who played Godot, and how great it was when he finally hit the stage. To my surprise, Marcela acted as if she hadn’t been asleep, and agreed with Lola and Dr. Benengeli. Marcela said, “Yeah. Godot was my favorite character, too. That actor was so charming.” This just inspired them more. They kept coming up with increasingly outlandish scenes starring Godot, and Marcela kept going along with it. Part of me wanted to tell Marcela that they were pulling her leg, that there is no Godot, that he never shows up. Lola and Dr. Benengeli were having so much fun that I couldn’t stop them.

  I just smiled and watched the freeway lights as we hurtled northward toward home.

  32

  The day after the play, Dr. Bishop checked into a medical hospital for what would be, in all likelihood, her last time. She left Eric in charge of putting her office affairs in order. Eric asked me to help him. I agreed.

  I swung by Dr. Bishop’s office at the end of my workday. Eric sat in Dr. Bishop’s big leather chair, running papers through an industrial-sized shredder. Clear plastic bags full of shredded paper surrounded him. He looked at me and looked at the bags. “It’s hard to believe,” he said. “A whole life’s work.”

  I nodded.

  “You mind taking them out to the dumpster?”

  I nodded again. I grabbed four bags full of shredded paper, two in each hand, and turned to leave the room.

  “Wait,” Eric said. He stood from the chair. “Let’s leave this here and break down the lab.”

  I set down the bags and headed into the lab, which was adjacent to Dr. Bishop’s office.

  The squirrels had been released back into their clearing. The wires had been removed from their cages. The cages were gone, though I don’t know where. On a plain, gray table in the northeast corner of the lab sat several flattened boxes, tape, bubble-wrap, and fifty or so surveillance cameras. Eric walked toward this table. I followed him. “I have to ask,” I said. “Where on earth did you and your mom get fifty surveillance cameras?”

  “Left over from the scandal,” Eric said.

  “Then I have to ask a second question. What was the scandal?”

  “You don’t know?” Eric picked up the first camera and started wrapping it in bubble-wrap.

  “Nope. I have no idea.”

  “Where were you living? Under a rock?”

  “Fresno,” I said. I followed Eric’s movements, wrapping up a camera of my own.

  “And you didn’t see anything about it?”

  I shrugged. I thought about why I hadn�
�t heard of the scandal at Winfield. It had occurred about eight years earlier, so I ran the mental rewind to that year and what I had been paying attention to. Because I’d been working at that community space, Fresno community issues mattered a lot to me then. I’d stayed apprised of those. Because the community space also had a small bookstore that helped keep us alive, I was aware of some international issues. I knew where everyone stood in the slicing up of Yugoslavia. I knew about ethnic Albanians and Serbs in Kosovo and atrocities in Bosnia and the US/NATO bombings of hospitals and schools and the Chinese embassy in Sarajevo. But I knew nothing about the closing of a private university a few hundred miles away. I thought about why the scandal had escaped me. “I guess I just didn’t pay attention,” I said. “I didn’t know anyone who went to school here.”

  “What about Lola?”

  “I was ten years out of touch with Lola by then.”

  Eric nodded. “It’s a long story,” he said. “I’ll try to give you the short version.

  “We had a chancellor at Winfield, a real piece of work. He cut tenure for all the professors, started firing the ones who were at the top of the salary range and replacing them with younger part-timers. He busted the union for all us service workers. Refused to negotiate with us. Fired everyone and said he’d only hire us back as independent contractors. And you know what that means. No benefits, no insurance, shit pay.” Eric shook his head.

  “Did you go back?”

  “I’m no scab. It was the only year of my adult life when I didn’t work on these grounds. So I wasn’t here for the scandal, but I saw it coming. If you’re gonna piss off everyone like this chancellor did, you better clear all them skeletons out of your closet first. And the chancellor left this big, ugly skeleton right there. Left the light on in his closet, too.”

  I took one of the flattened boxes, folded and taped it into shape, and packed into the box the four cameras Eric and I had prepared. I picked up another camera. Eric kept wrapping and talking.

  “A few years before he busted all the unions, he’d hired two maintenance guys to install surveillance cameras in the dorms. But only in the women’s dorms, and only in the places where it was clear what he wanted to use those cameras for. He taped a bunch of the girls taking showers and sleeping with their boyfriends and… Well, not sleeping with their boyfriends. But you know what I mean. He built his own little library of naked undergrads. Only when he fired everyone in our union, he fired the two guys he’d hired to install those cameras. They were part of the union, too. Then he hired those two back as scabs, but for lower wages. Those guys got pissed and showed the campus police where all the cameras were. The chancellor had busted the campus police’s union, too, which pissed off not only the campus officers, but it pissed off the county police force because those guys are all union and they didn’t want a non-union shop in their county. So, bam.” Eric snapped his fingers. “Those two guys sang, all the cameras came out of their hiding places, investigators found the chancellor’s video vault. Shit hit the fan. It was nuts.”

  Eric lifted his baseball cap, ran his leathery fingers through his gray-blond hair. “You should’ve seen that vault,” he said. “It was a big room, the size of a bedroom. Fifteen feet by fifteen feet, maybe. No windows. Floor-to-ceiling shelves full of videotapes. Eight years of videos. Eight years of girls taking showers and college kids fucking. Supposedly, he liked to watch girls use the bathroom, too. But who knows? The only things in the room besides the videotapes were a TV, a VCR, and a leather chair.”

  “Wow,” I said.

  “No kidding.” Eric packed one camera into the box and started wrapping the next. “Anyway, the police called the local paper. They sent a photographer out to take pictures of the room. Rumor has it he stuck a box of tissues by the leather chair before he took the photo. I don’t know if it’s true. I know there was a box of tissues in the picture. I just don’t know who put it there. Regardless, it was a huge scandal. Kids were upset. Parents were upset. A bunch of parents sued the school and won. The university declared bankruptcy. It was a mess.”

  “What happened to the chancellor?”

  “Nothing, really,” Eric said. “You know the story. Rich people don’t go to jail. He got probation or a suspended sentence or something like that. He’s down in LA now, vice president of something at some big corporation.”

  I shook my head. “I can’t believe he didn’t give those two guys enough money to keep their mouths shut.”

  “He was a cheap bastard. His bribe didn’t even add up to the amount of money he’d cut their pay. So they took the bribe and ratted him out, anyway.”

  “Good for them.”

  Eric shook his head. “They were fuckers. They should’ve been arrested, too. They never should’ve installed those cameras to begin with. What’s the saying? ‘Better the blind man who pisses out the window than the knowing servant who raises it for him.’”

  “Is that a saying?” I asked.

  Eric laughed. “Sure. Why not?”

  I sealed the first box, which was now full of cameras, and built the second box. Eric and I kept wrapping, packing, boxing.

  That night, I had to take a deeper look into the chancellor. Well, I didn’t have to. I wanted to. The more time I spent in Mindland, the better I became at rationalizing. I’d want to, say, snoop around the chancellor’s unconscious thoughts, so I’d tell myself that the chancellor would help me understand the mind of the wealthy. Which, to be honest, I couldn’t understand at all. I couldn’t think in terms of yachts or Swiss watches or whatever wealthy people think in terms of, which probably isn’t even yachts and Swiss watches. So the chancellor would help me understand what was so great about all this wealth, why people wanted it so badly, why Walters was willing to kill me to get at it. At least that’s what I told myself. I also told myself that these rationalizations were fine as long as I didn’t start believing them in earnest.

  After I’d completed my business in Mindland, I stuck around to have some fun. I called out the chancellor’s name. I was whipped back into the basement of the Williams Building. A dull yellow bulb shone above the room of the chancellor’s thoughts. He’s a good enough place to start. He’s probably sleeping. I can probably watch his dreams a little. I liked doing that: watching dreams. It had that same kind of mindlessness that watching television has, only dreams aren’t trying to sell me anything. I figured it was a nice enough way to round out this trip into Mindland.

  I followed the steps to the basement, entered a room under a dull yellow bulb, and slid inside the chancellor’s dreams. Which, as it turned out, were nightmares.

  Nightmares are scariest when they’re our own. They’re catered to our particular fears and obsessions. Watching someone else’s nightmares isn’t unlike watching a Luis Buñuel film, only faster. Men morph into little girls, monsters appear and devour, the dreamer fails to run or throw a punch, fails to escape situations that get exponentially worse, and it all happens at such a breakneck speed that a scene is replaced as soon as it appears.

  And so went the chancellor’s nightmares. Worse and worse until he woke up alone and sweating. I watched him get out of bed, walk to his bathroom, and wash his face. Despite the nightmares, the guy had clearly landed on his feet. His bedroom was nearly the size of my apartment. All his furniture was handmade from hardwoods. Even his pajamas were silk. Before I could catch myself, I mumbled, “Man, if you want to get rid of these nightmares, you should start giving back to the people you harmed.”

  He dried his face and said aloud to his reflection in the mirror. “I should give back to the people I harmed.”

  At this point, I could have left matters alone. I did not. I kept whispering into his mind. “Use your corporation,” I said. “Start a foundation for artists. Make Lola Diaz, the girl who painted the murals in McCabe Hall, the first recipient of the fellowship.”

  The chancellor walked back to his king-size bed and crawled into it alone. “Hmm,” he said. “Lola Diaz.” And he drifte
d off to sleep.

  I stuck around to watch another nightmare.

  Not to get too far ahead of my tale, but sure enough, two weeks after this night, Lola got a letter in the mail from the chancellor. His corporation had created a fund for artists, and she would receive the first fellowship. According to the letter, the idea had come to the chancellor in a dream. And how much was this fellowship for? Just about the amount you would expect a wealthy man to pay to assuage his nightmares.

  When Lola showed me the letter, I smiled and hugged her. But, really, it took another ten minutes before I stopped shaking.

  33

  It was hard not to snoop. It really was. When Dr. Bishop showed me the way into this world, she filled my life with temptations that I would’ve rather not battled. Suddenly, I had power. Suddenly, I could sneak into people’s minds and control their actions. On the one hand, like Walters said, I could convince myself that I could use this technology for good, but I didn’t really believe that. Everyone who gets power falls for that same rationalization: that they know what’s best for everyone, that they may be manipulating people a little bit, sure, but it’s for the greater good.

  I couldn’t forget that we have a word to describe the act of taking away people’s power to make their own decisions, of manipulating people to act against their own free will. It’s called tyranny. It’s never for the greater good.

  So, of course, the easiest thing for me to do would’ve been to stay out of Mindland altogether. Walters had forced my hand, though. I couldn’t stay out. I had to learn how to wield this technology at least well enough to ward off Walters. I had to keep going in.

  And while I was there, it was hard not to snoop. I really wanted to know some things that were none of my business. Like, for example, was Lola part of the Winfield scandal? Had the chancellor been soiling his tissues to the image of Lola and some college beau having sex in front of a security camera? Had that tape gotten out? Was this one of the ghosts haunting Lola? And what exactly had her father done to her? How did he do it? How much? All of these things poked at my curiosity and insecurities, and I wanted to know. And Lola’s mind was just a holler and a dull yellow light bulb and a trip to the Williams basement away. Still, I couldn’t do it. I had to respect Lola. Above everyone else, I had to respect her.