Madhouse Fog

by Sean Carswell

  I did snoop a little, of course. I couldn’t help myself. On my seventh or eighth trip into Mindland, I emerged from the footlocker and hollered the name of my old buddy in the ad industry, Brandon Burch. I figured he’d be an easy enough target. He wouldn’t recognize me in his brain; I wouldn’t find anything too compromising. It would all be innocent enough.

  Down in the Williams basement, I found Brandon sitting on a leather couch in the kind of bachelor pad that middle-aged men have when they have plenty of money and no particular sense of style. His couch covered one whole wall of the condo, turned the corner, and filled another half of a wall. It was puffy and too dark to harbor any real stains. Brandon’s feet were propped up on a black, glass-topped coffee table. He flipped through the channels until he got to a commercial advertising videos of drunk young women who raised their tops for the camera. He stopped there and watched for a minute.

  I’d expected to find him sleeping. I guess insomnia was a virus running through the advertising industry. I sat cautiously on a puffy armchair that matched the puffy couch. I didn’t say anything. With Walters, I’d learned one lesson about talking to a conscious person in Mindland. With the chancellor, I’d learned another lesson. I listened for Brandon’s thoughts. I was surprised to find him ruminating on death.

  Someone he’d worked with—a mentor, I gathered—had recently died. The funeral was in two days. Brandon thought about the funeral and thoughts horrifying to Brandon lingered just below these surface meditations. I delved beneath his surface, listened to his fears that he would end up like his mentor, that he was ending up like his mentor: alone in a two-bedroom condo with one empty bedroom and wood floors that always felt cold under his bare feet and a bunch of doors that separated rooms for no reason because it wasn’t like anyone else ever came to this apartment ever. A sadness lingered in Brandon, flashing into his vision like the head in a Whac-A-Mole game destined to reemerge from a new hole every time Brandon took the hammer and smacked it down. And Brandon had stopped hammering the mole a long time ago. He just flipped the channels and meditated on the flashing lights of his huge flat-screen TV and tried to forget the days when he first started working in advertising—a failing musician with a new day job and the rationalization that he’d only do the day job until the new band and the move to Los Angeles all panned out for him; a guy who, after all, really could play his guitar well and actually did know how to sing and could pen little jingles that crept into people’s brains and repeated themselves regardless of attempts to dislodge the tune; a guy who wrote a jingle for a big box store’s ad campaign, a jingle so incessant, so tormenting that even Brandon couldn’t get out of his head. Below all of this in Brandon’s insomniac mind was the fear that he feared the most: that he had become the person he’d always hated. That he’d hated this person for good reasons: because what little imagination and creativity he had was for sale, because what he bought with the money he made selling his talent was more or less worthless to him, because he had one chance to ride this rock around the sun for seventy or so circles and he was squandering that chance chasing ends that were ultimately unsatisfying. Now, Brandon couldn’t help mourning the death of the man who’d led him into this world. And the funeral was in two days.

  So much for snooping.

  The next day, I called Brandon from my office in the psych hospital. He picked up the phone and said, “Oak View State Psychiatric Hospital.”

  “Yes, sir, this is Oak View,” I said. “We’ll be sending a couple of our associates to speak to you today. You’ll recognize them by their white coats. It’s in your best interest to just do what they say.”

  “You’ll never take me alive.”

  “The hell with it,” I said, breaking character. “You’re too crazy for this place, anyway.”

  Brandon laughed a quick, insincere laugh. “What are you really calling about?”

  “I’m heading to Los Angeles tomorrow. Burbank, actually. I thought maybe we could meet up, grab lunch, something.”

  “I have to go to a funeral tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Who died?”

  “Some fucker,” Brandon said. “No one.”

  “Is the funeral anywhere near Burbank?”

  “It’s in Burbank. Forest Lawn Cemetery. Why? Wanna come?”

  “Sure,” I said. That was the whole idea behind my call in the first place. I had no other business in Burbank beyond being with a friend at a funeral. “Can you pick me up at the Burbank train station?”

  “Figures you’d be the only one in the world to come into Los Angeles without a car. What time does the train come in?”

  I checked the schedule and gave Brandon the time. He told me he’d be there.

  The train was delayed for forty-five minutes outside of Simi Valley. The police there had chased two kids into the train tunnel. The juveniles and the police were engaged in an armed standoff. At least that’s what the conductor had announced. I waited in my seat, surrounded by boxy apartment buildings and the faux old train station, by the dry brush and jagged hills of the valley beyond. I had a Japanese paperback with me. It was all about a lonely guy searching for a lost pinball machine. I got so wrapped up in the novel that I forgot about the police pursuit, the fear I had of Simi Valley policemen—Simi Valley being where the jury acquitted the policemen who beat Rodney King, after all—and the kids in the tunnel, the train delay, the upcoming funeral, everything. I followed this lost Japanese guy and his quixotic pursuit and felt like I was right there with him. Or more accurately, I felt like I was him. Together, we stumbled and weaved around the labyrinth in our minds. We groped blindly for meaning. He told me that good questions have no answers. I found a little comfort in that.

  I got so lost in that book that I didn’t notice the train moving again. I barely looked up as the valley gave way to warehouses, sound stages, box stores, freeways, dry riverbanks, burrito stands, and gas stations. If I hadn’t finished the book before reaching the Burbank station, I may have kept riding right past it. As things stood, I looked up in time to exit the train and catch sight of Brandon, arms crossed, framed by the Burbank airport, poised to attack me for still not having a car. I slid my paperback into my backpack and walked across the platform. Brandon didn’t move. He was decked out in a black suit. With the suit, his sunglasses, and his bald head, he looked like a federal agent. Still, old habits are hard to break, so I said to him, “Fester!”

  A smile shattered his countenance. He stuck out his hand to shake mine. I grabbed his hand and pulled him close for a hug.

  “Good to see the train’s running on time as usual,” Brandon said. He pointed toward his car. We started walking.

  I told him about the police showdown in Simi Valley.

  “Fuck it,” Brandon said. “At least we got to skip the church service.” He pushed a remote control and unlocked the doors of his Lexus sedan. I climbed into the passenger side. He climbed into the driver’s side and started the car.

  “Sorry about making you miss that.”

  “Are you kidding? Apologizing because you made me miss church? Shit. I should thank you.”

  We pulled out of the parking lot and Brandon drove us to Forest Lawn cemetery. Our conversation was stilted and groping, the way conversations tend to be with old friends who haven’t seen each other for a while, old friends who have become strangers.

  We got to the cemetery behind the hearse, but apparently within a minute or two of the procession. Groups of single men, all in black suits, drifted over to a tent and some chairs positioned around an open grave. Brandon and I left the car and drifted into these flows. I watched the faces of the men. No one seemed particularly bereaved. I caught snatches of dirty jokes, talk of the company’s open bar after the funeral, comments expressing the desire for a short service. Someone behind me said, “I hope they plant this bastard quick. My kid’s got a little league game tonight.”

  Brandon winced at these words. It was a tiny wince that came and went in the span of time it take
s for a hummingbird to flap his wings. I was polite enough to act like I didn’t notice. We circled around the open grave. The priest said a few generic words and read a psalm. No one cried. The casket was lowered into the ground. I watched it gradually descend and felt bad for Brandon and realized that my coming here, my masquerading as a friend even though he and I hadn’t really been friends for years, was as quixotic as every other effort that I’d made to make the world a better place. The fact that no one seemed to care put a finer point on it all.

  After the crowd left for their little league games and open bars, Brandon and I wandered around the cemetery. Brandon had been there several times before, apparently. He offered to show me the graves of Lucille Ball, Freddie Prinze, Liberace, Marvin Gaye. I declined to see them all. One tombstone was just like another. We walked across the plush grass, sweating in our black suits, talking about little bits of nothing. Brandon asked me if I was still married, a question that always bugged me when I was still married because it seemed to have such a sense of doom. It seemed to imply that marriage wasn’t at all what it pretended to be. The question bugged me even more when he asked it, and I wasn’t still married. It had an I-told-you-so quality to it. I swallowed my pride, though, and said, “Nope. We got divorced a few months back.”

  “Seeing anyone new?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you meet her in the nuthouse?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Was she an inmate?”

  “A patient. But, yes.”

  Brandon looked to see if I was kidding. When he saw I wasn’t, he said, “You always did go for the train wreck girls, didn’t you?”

  I nodded. Even when I’d been married, I’d get little crushes on an occasional woman in my life. The crushes were nothing I had any intention of acting on. They’d just blossom and wilt in my chest. And once the flower of the crush had withered down to dried potpourri, I’d realize that I always did fall for the girls with the biggest piles of baggage. I think that realization kept me married longer than I otherwise would’ve been. I felt like, if not my wife, I’d just be with some other tormented woman and her purse full of painful memories.

  I didn’t like Brandon pointing this out, but it was fair game. After I’d wandered into his mind and eavesdropped, it was only right that he point things out that I tried to keep below the surface of my own conscious thoughts.

  We kept wandering among the tombstones. I idly read the names. They meant little to me. A parade of lives that didn’t really touch mine. Just as my tombstone will probably mean nothing to most people who see it whenever that day comes. It’ll just be an empty name and a couple of dates. And that’s if I even get a tombstone at all, now that they’ve gone the way of the telegraph. I almost tripped over Bobby Fuller’s grave marker and stopped there. “Wait a minute,” I said. “Is this the Bobby Fuller? The ‘I Fought the Law’ guy?”

  “Really?” Brandon said. “Scatman Crothers means nothing to you, but Bobby Fuller is impressive?”

  “It’s a great song.”

  Brandon decided to sit down in the grass there. I sat there, too. Brandon told me the story of Bobby Fuller’s death, about how it may have been a murder. I knew nothing about it. I just knew his songs. I listened to Brandon’s story. For a second, I flashed back to the days of Pop Culture and the References, the days spent on the road, the fights and the stories, all the songs we played and floors we slept on and beers we drank. It seemed like a whole other life, a world away from where we were now: a middle-aged grant writer and a middle-aged copywriter in our funeral suits.

  Brandon finished his story. Daylight hung around us, obscured through the yellow smog, enriched by the plush lawn, twinkling off the metal grave markers. I said, “What do you think of when you think of Cincinnati?”

  “One asshole of a city,” Brandon said. “Why?”

  “Do you remember a show we played there?”

  Brandon gazed off down the hill, the gears of his mind trying to churn out a memory. I waited. He said, “Vaguely. A crappy warehouse. No one came. Was that Cincinnati?”

  I shrugged.

  Brandon gave a little laugh. “I guess that could’ve been about ten cities, huh?”

  I nodded.

  “What do you think of when you think of Cincinnati?” Brandon asked.

  “You and Pop were fighting. I wandered off on my own and bought a Stiff Little Fingers record. The girl from the record store was really pretty. She came out to the show and danced to every song. It felt to me like the best show we ever played.”

  “Cincinnati, huh? Was the girl a cute, chubby little chick? Big round face?”

  “Yeah,” I said, getting a little excited. “Do you remember?”

  “Nah,” Brandon said. “I just figure that, if you dug her, she had to be a little chubby chick with a big round face.”

  “So you don’t remember that show?”

  “No.”

  “Not at all?”

  “Not at all. That memory exists for you and you alone.”

  I plucked a few strands of grass and let them flutter away in the wind. “So what if I forget about it? What happens to that part of the past?”

  Brandon stood and brushed off the seat of his pants. “Come on,” he said. “I don’t have time for these stupid fucking questions. The agency is springing for free drinks.”

  The agency, as it turned out, was Dickinson and Associates. It was Frank Walters’ company. And the guy who died was Walters’ second in command on the fifteenth floor. I saw Walters briefly at the reception. If Walters knew I was there, he didn’t give any indication.

  Ape Man knew I was there. He spent half the afternoon staring at Brandon and me.

  34

  Lola was in my apartment when I got home from work. She had just gotten out of the shower. Her hair was still wet. She wore white clamdiggers and a camisole. Camisole was a word that Lola had taught me. A few weeks earlier—actually, it was the day after my first trip into Mindland—I had asked Lola, “What do you call these shirts that you’re always wearing?”

  “They’re not shirts,” she’d said. “They’re camisoles.”

  And from that point on, I could think about Lola more accurately instead of thinking, ‘Wow, Lola looks great in that shirt,’ which was all wrong because the word “shirt” made me picture a t-shirt. Lola looked great in a t-shirt, too. But it was the wrong image for my head. I wanted to picture the loose, silky tops she wore. The ones that had the thin straps dividing the line between her nape and her shoulders. The ones that showed off the pale skin below her neck and between her breasts. The ones that really made me think, ‘Wow, she looks great in that.’ The camisole.

  This camisole Lola wore was a soft purple, the color of a grape juice stain that has faded on your white t-shirt after the fifteenth or twentieth time in the laundry. She still carried her towel and dried the ends of her hair. I brought a couple of bags into the kitchen and set a pot half-full of water on the stove to boil. Lola sat in a kitchen chair. “You’re cooking tonight?”

  “Spinach lasagna,” I said. I took the groceries out of the bag, lined them up on the counter, took out a cutting board, and started on the garlic. Lola watched me. I could see bits of paint in the grooves of her knuckles. “What were you working on today?”

  “Mostly on that same painting. The one on the floor. I’m calling it Untitled #2.”

  “What’s the first Untitled?”

  “There is no first Untitled. But that’s just such a beginner’s-sounding title. I don’t like it. It makes me feel like I’m on my first painting ever.”

  “But Untitled #2 doesn’t make you feel like you’re on your second painting ever?”

  “It does. That’s why I always use that title until I’m finished with the painting. It always gives me that great feeling that I’m on a second time around.” Lola folded her towel and hung it on the back of the chair next to her. She tucked her hair behind her ears. “It’s like, I don’t know. It’s like, the first t
ime you do something, it’s always a jumbled mess. You don’t know what you’re doing. You’re groping your way through the darkness. You don’t know the rules or the shortcuts. It’s no good. And, by the third time you do something, it starts to get that stain of a habit on it. But the second time… Baby, that’s where the magic is.”

  I browned the garlic and some eggplant on top of it. I asked Lola to explain what she’d painted on Untitled #2. She told me all about the colors she’d used, the details she’d agonized over, the little figures that leapt from her subconscious onto the canvas. I cooked and listened to her. Times like this, I would think about my divorce and what really shook me up about it. I would realize that I didn’t miss my ex-wife so much as I missed being married: missed having someone at home when I got there; missed having someone to cook for and who would cook for me; missed having someone else’s stories to fill up the apartment; missed having someone else’s clothes on my floor and funny lotions and bottles I couldn’t quite understand in my shower; missed another human’s warmth in my bed in the middle of the night; missed having to attend awkward events and having to watch horrible movies just because someone wanted me there beside her. I missed the meaning your life takes on when you’re not just living it for yourself anymore. When I’d been with my ex-wife, we each had our individual lives, but together, we’d formed a third identity. A we grew from her and me. When we split up, it felt like she and I had killed that little we. That’s what I missed. And now, with Lola more or less moved in—using her studio apartment as a genuine studio and spending her evenings here with me—I could feel a new little we growing from Lola and me. In a way, I guess it was like bringing in Clint Dempsey once my ex-wife and I had put Nietzsche to sleep.