Madhouse Fog

by Sean Carswell

  When the lasagna was layered and in the oven and Lola was done explaining everything about Untitled #2, I sat at the table across from her. She turned in her seat to face me. “I met your neighbor today,” she said.

  “Oh, yeah? Who?”

  “The blind guy. What’s his name?”

  “Frank?”

  Lola looked up at the ceiling fan above us and thought this over. “No,” she said. “Frank doesn’t sound right.”

  It had to be Walters, though. I said, “Was he dressed up?”

  “Oh my god, was he. I wanted to ask him if I could touch his shirt. It seemed so soft. And the rest of that suit? Christ. He must’ve spent a few grand on that.”

  “And did he have a skinhead guy with him? A guy with a big tattoo on his face?”

  “Yeah. You know him, right?”

  “I know him.”

  Lola picked up a fat candle from the middle of the kitchen table. She spun it around on its glass-dish base like a slow moving record. I pushed the matches across the table. She lit a match and used it to light the candle. Her lips pursed. She blew out the match. “Anyway,” she said. “The poor guy. He came into the wrong house. He just opened our front door and walked in here. I had to tell him that he had the wrong place. The poor guy looked so sad when I told him that.”

  “I bet he recovered pretty quickly, huh?”

  “He did. He even knew my name. He said, ‘I’m sorry, Lola.’ And he just backed out the door. The funny thing is, you’d think the guy with him—the skinhead, the one who could see—would’ve told him that he was opening the wrong door.”

  I picked up the spent match and twirled it between the pads of my fingers. “You’d think.”

  Lola smiled. She brushed her hair off her shoulders, exposing the soft purple strap of her camisole. “But you told him about me, huh? How sweet.”

  I set the match on the table in front of me. “How sweet,” I said. I couldn’t even look Lola in the eye when I said it.

  News of Frank Walters didn’t sit well with me. I could hardly eat my lasagna. I couldn’t pay any attention to the DVD that Lola watched, couldn’t even muster up a groan when the protagonist realized that he loved the underfed girl and raced to tell her before her plane left and she was gone forever. Later that night, Lola and I were in bed. She was naked, with her legs spread wide. My head was between her legs. My nose nuzzled her sweet spot and my tongue explored everything just below. She ran her fingers through my hair, occasionally trying to grab on to it and pull, but I’d cut it too short for her to get a real handful. I was naked, too, but in no real hurry to move on to the next step. And that’s when it occurred to me that Frank Walters and his Ape Man could bust in at any moment and ruin everything. And this should’ve been the perfect time for me. Lola and I were in that Untitled #2 phase, when we’d worked past the initial awkwardness and made our mistakes and learned the rules and shortcuts, but before the stain of habit seeped in. I did everything I could to focus on the good around me. I kept my eyes and mind on Lola for the next half-hour.

  When she fell asleep, I crept out of bed, dressed, and left the apartment. As I locked the door behind me, I was determined. Tonight, this thing with Frank Walters was going to end.

  I rode my bike toward the beach, racing across the pedestrian bridge over the freeway and down the promenade. No pedestrians were out this late at night. A few groups of homeless people milled around in different alcoves, trying to stay hidden from the wind, waiting for the police to come along and scatter them, send them down to the riverbed where they’d sleep through the night. I whipped past them, a ghost dressed in jeans, a black hoodie, and black sneakers. I had lights for my bike, but I kept them off. There were three ways to get from the promenade to the bike trail that I wanted. Each night, I varied which path I took. I didn’t think that Walters was following me. I didn’t want to take any chances, either way. I wound down the promenade, along the riverbed, back behind a few warehouses, and onto the trail that led up the mountains north of town. The trail was separated from the street. No one could follow me on it without a bicycle, and a second bicycle would’ve been conspicuous at this time of night. I figured no one knew I was there. I pedaled up the gradual slope, keeping a solid pace. The hospital was ten miles up this trail. A lot of it would be uphill. I’d been taking this ride every night for a few weeks, though. Once the initial soreness worked its way out of my muscles, the ride was easy. Just me and the moon and the oil rigs pumping on the hills to my left. I pedaled and I thought about Walters and Dr. Bishop and me.

  We were the last three left who believed in Dr. Bishop’s discovery. I’d done a little more research on Dr. Toru—her former colleague at Stanford, the one who’d started selling the information to Walters. I found out that she’d spent a couple of years after Dr. Bishop’s retirement writing essays that completely discredited Dr. Bishop’s research. She’d abandoned the concept of consciously entering the collective unconscious and painted the experiments as a batty old scientist’s flights of fantasy. As far as Dr. Toru was concerned, the brain factory—fMRIs, EEGs, neuromarketing—was where it was at nowadays. The psychological community seemed to be in agreement. I wondered if Dr. Bishop had had a hand in all of that, if maybe she’d been lingering around in Mindland for much longer than she let on, if maybe she’d found a way to enter it years ago, and was only now admitting to it because Walters was hot on her trail and she needed me to shake him. Or because the cancer was winning the battle and she needed one more person to go inside and verify that she hadn’t been dreaming it all, that she really had entered and someone else could follow her into a shared unconscious.

  There were ways for me to solve these mysteries, but I wasn’t at all prepared to face the answers. My desire for ignorance was justified. Especially considering the most troubling bit of information that popped up in front of my face periodically: Dr. Bishop’s former colleague, Dr. Amanda Toru, was spending her late fifties checking in and out of psychiatric institutions.

  I thought of Dr. Toru and our encounter on psych hospital grounds and the conspicuous absence of keys or a visitor’s badge on her person. I feared the day would come when I’d be at Oak View without my own keys dangling from my hip, telling tales of the giants in Dr. Bishop’s research and everyone else turning those giants into windmills in their minds. So I let it go. I stayed focused on Walters.

  He was such a dangerous guy. He wanted to rule the world. He’d found the technology that would allow him to rule it. Now, with Dr. Bishop in the hospital, only one person stood between him and a power that most people can only dream of. Me. From his perspective, I had to be a pretty surmountable obstacle. Who was I? An anonymous guy with a forgettable office job and an apartment that had housed so many tenants it may as well have a revolving door on it. I had to be one of the easiest people to erase from this world. Who would even call for the investigation? The only person who seemed to see me on a regular basis and care whether I lived or died had just gotten out of a psych hospital. Even if Lola had known everything I’d been up to, who would have believed her when she told my story? So, for Walters—a guy so fixated on getting exactly what he wanted; so desperate to escape his fifteenth-floor purgatory—Mindland and all the power he could gain from it was right at his fingertips. All he would have to do is torment Lola until I showed him the way to RW Winfield’s cottage. And I knew myself. I wouldn’t let him torment Lola long. I wouldn’t let her be a martyr. I’d sing right away. Even though I knew the consequences. This was my reasoning, anyway. This was why I felt like the world was too small for both Walters and me to live in it.

  Scariest of all was the thing I’d been thinking of every night for the past week, since I’d gone to that funeral with Brandon and looked eye-to-eye at the Ape Man and knew Walters was right on the edge of getting what he wanted, the thing I’d been thinking as I pedaled up this six-foot-wide, paved bike path flanked to the left by oil rigs and to the right by the industrial yards of the companies operating
those rigs. If Walters wanted to run the world, I was the only obstacle he had to overcome. But I’d also been thinking, and this is the scary thing, that the flipside of that statement was true. I could rule the world, if I wanted to. I could have that power that others can only dream of. Walters was my only obstacle.

  I entered the Oak View State Psychiatric Hospital from the northeast corner, rode through the arboretum, and locked my bike against a tree outside the RW Winfield cottage. I unlocked the door. It swung open with only a slight squeak from the ancient hinges. I scanned the arboretum behind me. Natural grasses, indigenous trees, flowers with dreamlike colors in the moonlight, but there were no people around. I stepped into the cottage and shut the door behind me. The ancient brass key fit into the lock. I locked the door.

  I didn’t need the penlight any more. I’d been in this cottage for more than a dozen times over the past few weeks. My routine felt like second nature by now. I skipped the first seventeen steps of Dr. Bishop’s nineteen-step plan. They’d been red herrings, anyway. I probably didn’t even need the footlocker or to be in the one-lane bowling alley. I climbed in, anyway, just in case. Two minutes later, I stood in Mindland. Welcome back.

  There was no point in stalling or wandering around. Tonight, I’d end things. I yelled out, “Connor Jarred.” A dull yellow light flickered over a doorway. I raced down and entered. A parade of images flashed in front of me, impossible to separate or make sense of individually. Collectively, they amounted to REM. Ape Man was dreaming. Dreams didn’t help me. They were too random, too hard to control. Most of us forget our dreams almost instantly. Even if we remember them, we tell ourselves, “It was just a dream,” and move on with our waking life. So I made the sound of an alarm clock in Ape Man’s head and he woke up.

  I had figured out a few little tricks in Mindland. The first was figuring out how to plant memories. All I had to do was eavesdrop on a thought, then weave my thoughts into it. The key was to keep things visual, to project the words and images over memories as if they were a movie. I would begin by showing the scene that triggered the thought. When Ape Man was visualizing it, I would cast my images over his images. Memory is fragile enough as it is. It’s malleable. And dealing with a weak mind like Ape Man’s, memory was a lump of clay on a spinning wheel. I could make it into what I wanted. There was one memory in particular I was working on.

  The poor guy had been molested on a camping trip when he was a little kid. He’d never dealt with this. He, in fact, spent a lot of time trying to repress it. The memory continued to haunt him, even before I started making sure it haunted him. He couldn’t seem to keep it repressed. And, just as I’d done for the last several nights, I projected the memory into Ape Man’s mind.

  We found ourselves sitting in the high desert, surrounded by a circle of two-man and four-man tents, chaparral, the wobbly, cartoon arms of saguaros. A campfire burned in front of us. Ape Man and I sat on lawn chairs. I looked nothing like I do outside of Mindland. I looked, I guess, like one of Ape Man’s childhood friends. In this memory, I was ten or eleven years old. Ape Man was the same age, but he looked like a thirty-year-old Ape Man shrunk down to ten-year-old size. He was bald. He wore his obligatory white shirt and red suspenders. The light from the campfire licked the tribal tattoo on his face. The adult who was supervising the camping trip was in the big tent behind us. Ape Man kept looking nervously over his shoulder, waiting to be called into that tent.

  The humane thing to do would’ve been to spend this time convincing Ape Man that it wasn’t his fault, that he could get help for this, that he could get past it, that the memory would keep haunting him until he faced it. Part of me wanted to do that. I thought of myself as the kind of person who helped people solve problems, not someone who exacerbated them for my own purposes. But I guess there was more to me than I thought, a dark little voice inside that got to have a say once in a while.

  So I reminded myself that I wasn’t here to do the humane thing. I was here to protect Lola and myself by any means at my disposal. I projected a new image onto the molester. I turned him into Frank Walters.

  For the first few nights, I had difficulty passing Walters off as the molester. Repetition has a way of turning lies into truth. By this night, I didn’t have to project at all. Frank Walters rustled around in the tent behind us. Ape Man waited to be called. I said to him, “Tonight’s the night, Connor. You have to stop him.”

  “I can’t stop him,” Ape Man said.

  “You can. I’ll tell you how. It’s simple. You just have to destroy all the information he gets from the mental hospitals. That’s what gives him the power to get into your mind like this. Destroy all that information, and he’ll lose the power.”

  Ape Man stared at me. Every night, he had trouble with this. He said, “Huh?”

  “Destroy the information, and he can’t hurt you.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Listen to me. Just destroy the information.”

  “Then he can’t hurt me?”

  “Then he can’t hurt you.”

  Walters clambered out of the tent. He shouted, “Connor!”

  Ape Man stood.

  “Be tough,” I said.

  He nodded.

  “Destroy the information,” I said.

  He nodded. “Destroy it all.” He had a look of determination on his face. It was a look I’d never seen on him before: courage behind those sky blue eyes. I could feel the fear leaving him. It seemed like, on this night, he would act. Ape Man turned away from me and went into the tent. Frank Walters followed him inside.

  The first couple of times Ape Man and I went through this scenario, I would leave his mind once the memory was planted. It seemed like my work was done. My fear was that, if I stuck around too long, he’d know I was there. He had to know a little of what Walters was up to. Someone had to be reading all of those psychological essays to Walters. Someone had to read the reports I’d sent to Walters. Ape Man had been right next to Walters through it all. Sure, it was possible that he didn’t understand what he was reading and what Walters was up to. But I doubted that. Ape Man wasn’t stupid. He was unreasonably angry and suffered from an unhealthy dose of cognitive dissonance, but he wasn’t stupid. He knew some of what Walters was up to. He had to. So I feared that, if I stayed in his mind snooping around too much, I’d be discovered.

  That wasn’t the case. Not really.

  I’d figured this one out, too. In order to manipulate me, Dr. Bishop would have been in my conscious mind. She would have directed a few daydreams. In retrospect, I could think back to some of my daydreams and guess which ones Dr. Bishop had a hand in. But I never suspected her while it was happening. Even after I knew what her research was, I didn’t suspect her. Walters had only picked up on me in his mind because I’d been so awkward about it. I’d tried to talk to him and Mindland manipulation works best with projected images, not conversations. It was beyond my capacity to plant images in the mind of a blind man, so all Walters had to do was recognize when the voices in his head were coming from me. Also, Walters probably knew I was there because we all create our realities to a certain extent and the reality that Walters created included me sneaking around in his mind. Ape Man wouldn’t have gone this far, though, so I could stick with him.

  One thing Ape Man wrestled with was his participation in Walters’ white-collar world. I knew this by snooping on his conscious thoughts. He often daydreamed about conversations with one of his skinhead buddies, a guy who always talked about blue-collar ethics, about the workers sticking together and class war and all that. Of course, I knew that Ape Man came from money, but I also knew it didn’t matter. The guy was a study in contradiction. I guess we all are, to some extent. So I played with that. As long as I stayed close to skinhead rhetoric, I could masquerade as this guy in Ape Man’s daydreams.

  Ape Man snapped out of his memories of childhood trauma. He climbed out of bed and walked out of his bedroom. I whispered, “Is Uncle Frank awake?” in his head. Ap
e Man walked down the hallway, paused outside Walters’ bedroom door, and listened to the rhythmic hum of Walters’ snoring. Ape Man kept walking down the hallway and into the kitchen. The kitchen was easier to recognize through Ape Man’s eyes: the granite countertop of the kitchen island that Walters had leaned against while his water boiled, the gas stove with a red tea kettle on it, the oak cabinets that housed his mugs and everything else. Like Walters’ wardrobe, the kitchen was impeccable, tasteful, a beautiful sight that Walters would never see. Ape Man didn’t pay attention. He went to the refrigerator, grabbed a bottle of Newcastle Brown, and sat at the kitchen table.

  I joined him in his thoughts, saying, “Another sleepless night, CJ?”

  Ape Man shook his head. He took a long, deep drink from his bottle of beer.

  “It’s all this rich boy shit. You forgot your roots. Now you got nothing left but a life of sucking some rich fuck’s cock. That’s what those nightmares are about.”

  Ape Man tried to shake these thoughts from his head, but as long as I stayed there, he’d keep having them. No amount of beer he drank could wash me away. I could feel him heating up, the adrenaline burning through his veins. He fought the flashing images of the memory he’d just sweated himself out of. The quick images of a little Ape Man screaming, “Destroy it all!”

  Ape Man fiddled with a day-old copy of the Los Angeles Times that had been lying on the kitchen table since he had read it to Walters that morning. Ape Man ran his fingers along the edges of the pages and let the ink stain his fingertips.

  “You could throw that paper on the stove,” I told him. “Put an end to all this fancy bullshit built on the backs of the working class.”

  I expected some hesitation on Ape Man’s part. I’d even created further, deeper arguments that I could wield against Ape Man’s initial resistance. Truth be told, I feared that I wouldn’t be able to pull it off. These actions went against so many of my inclinations, so much of who I thought I was, that I wasn’t at all sure I could overcome any resistance that Ape Man produced. But he didn’t argue, and he didn’t question my ideas. He didn’t resist at all. I guess that a person who becomes a skinhead and a bodyguard doesn’t typically get there by ruminating over the subtleties of issues and coming to a rational decision about them. A person gets there by acting first and denying his regrets later.