Madhouse Fog

by Sean Carswell

  Ape Man lifted his beer and chugged the rest of it. He thought, “Destroy it all.” He tossed a section of the newspaper on the stove and lit all four burners. The paper burst into flames that reached beyond the range hood and licked the oak cabinets. Within a few seconds, the thin bottom of the cabinets caught fire and new flames spread across the cabinet doors.

  I thought to myself, maybe this is enough. Maybe if Walters sees me burn his house down, it will scare him off my trail. Maybe I can torment Ape Man enough to keep Walters away.

  Ape Man had a different idea, though.

  He grabbed another section of the Times, rolled it into a thick tube, and lit one end. He headed back down the hallway to Walters’ room. I knew what Ape Man was thinking. Of course I did. I probably could have stopped him. I probably should have. My initial plan was just to have Ape Man burn the house down and hope that a smoke alarm or something would wake Walters. Walters was an agile guy. He knew his house well. He could escape whether the house was on fire or not. I tried to tell myself that I didn’t want Walters dead. I just wanted him scared to death.

  Regardless, I knew where Ape Man was going with that burning tube and who he planned to set on fire. I could’ve stopped him. But I didn’t. I didn’t want to face what all this Mindland business was turning me into. I just got the hell out of this guy’s brain.

  35

  Eric waited for me outside the cottage. This surprised me. It was nearly one in the morning. I expected the whole campus to be empty, asleep. Eric sat on the same bench I’d sat on with Dr. Bishop two weeks earlier. A paper bag lay by his foot. He reached inside and grabbed a bottle of pale ale. “Join me?”

  I took a seat next to him. He handed me the bottle. I used the bottle opener on my key chain to open one for me and one for Eric. “Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  We didn’t say a word for a minute or two. The fog of having been in Mindland hadn’t yet lifted in my brain. I still felt a bit horrified.

  Later, when the story hit the news, when Ape Man was in custody and blaming me, when detectives investigated the incidentals, when my name came up and a detective decided to follow that lead, when he visited my office and interviewed me, I was glad that Eric had happened to be outside the cottage at this moment. He’d given me a solid alibi for the night of the fire.

  I couldn’t have known any of this ahead of time. I just sipped my beer and tried to relax there in the arboretum. “How’s your mom doing?” I asked.

  Eric shook his head. “She’ll never leave her hospital bed again.”

  I knew this. I just wasn’t expecting Eric to speak so bluntly. I said, “It’s a shame.”

  Eric nodded.

  “She’s a great woman.”

  Eric nodded again.

  “I’d like to visit her.”

  “You should. She asks about you every day.”

  “I can’t,” I said. “I went there yesterday. They said only family is allowed.”

  Eric folded the paper bag down over the beer at his feet. He brushed a leaf off his shoe. “I’ll take care of that,” he said. “I’ll say you’re a cousin from out of town. Make sure they let you in.”

  “Thanks.”

  Moonlight and pine needles and patches of silence fell around us. I thought of Lola, sleeping alone. I hoped she wouldn’t wake. I don’t know if she’d noticed me sneaking out at night. She hadn’t said anything. I thought if I could just get back unnoticed tonight, then it’d be the last time. All of this will be over.

  Eric picked up an acorn from the bench. He tossed it at the cottage door. “Do you believe any of this?” he asked.

  “Any of what?”

  “Any of this Mindland crap.”

  I shrugged.

  “You must, right?” he said. “You must believe it if you keep going down into the bowling alley.”

  I shrugged again. Eric looked at me. He didn’t have to say it for me to know what he was getting at. His mother was dying and he was serious, here. I knew something and he deserved to know. I lied. I said, “I want to believe it. I want to believe it for her sake, you know.” I shook my head, stared at my feet. “But it’s just not working. I can’t get in.”

  “I know,” Eric said. “I tried, too. Followed all nineteen of her steps. It didn’t work. All I felt was that footlocker around me. It felt like a coffin.”

  I knew that about Eric. Dr. Bishop had told me that I was her second choice for this mission. She’d first tried to help Eric into Mindland, but he couldn’t take that nineteenth step. She said that one of the reasons she chose me had to do with my study of Eastern spirituality. I’d long since learned to meditate. I practiced it often. I guess this was key. “Has anyone else tried to get into Mindland?” I asked, trying to sound casual, probably not pulling it off.

  Eric shook his head. “Not that I know of.” He picked up another acorn, rolled it around in his hands, and tossed it at the door. “This is impossible. There is no Mindland. I’m gonna tear this sucker down tomorrow.”

  “The cottage?”

  “Yep.”

  “The bowling alley underneath?”

  “The whole fucking thing.”

  “How? Why?”

  “Mom’s orders. The last thing she signed. I got a crew coming tomorrow to take it all down, piece by piece. We’ll haul in earth to fill up that old, warped-lane alley.”

  “What are you going to do with Winfield’s remains?”

  “Box them up and mail them to a great-granddaughter who’s still living on his wealth.”

  “And your mom wanted this?”

  Eric nodded. He drank some beer. We both took a few minutes for our thoughts. Then Eric broke the silence. He said, “I’ve destroyed all of her research. It’s all gone.”

  “I figured you’d be done by now,” I said. I’d seen the bed of his truck piled high with plastic bags full of shredded paper. A scientific legacy on its way to the recycling plant.

  “I’ve even ground up the hard drives of the computers she’d been working on. When this sucker comes down tomorrow, there won’t be anything left.”

  “Your mom will still be left.”

  “For a few days, anyway.”

  Eric and I sat in the arboretum and polished off the whole six-pack. It was the first time in years that I’d drank three beers in one sitting. I was a little wobbly as I raced my bike down the mountain toward my apartment.

  And, at that exact moment, down in Malibu, the fire department arrived on the property of Frank Walters. Only the charred skeleton of his house remained. Walters and everything he owned had burned up in the fire. All that was left was Walters’ nephew, standing on the curb in front of Walters’ house, watching the smoldering ash. Crying.

  36

  Eric walked me to Dr. Bishop’s hospital room the next morning. We were both a little tired from our midnight excursion in the arboretum. Eric said, “I’m gonna get breakfast at that little diner on Telegraph. Take all the time you need.” He slid out of the room, leaving me alone with what was left of Dr. Bishop.

  She lay in her hospital bed surrounded by a monitor for her heart, a respirator for her lungs, tubes pumping nutrients in and ushering waste out, flower arrangements wilting, get-well cards wishing the impossible. Her gray hair was greasy and matted from where the nurses must have cradled her head to change the pillowcase underneath. Her hospital gown swallowed what was left of her skin and bones. This was the first time I’d seen her without makeup. I’d grown accustomed to a Dr. Bishop who looked professional, sharp. This person in the hospital bed seemed almost like a stranger. Sunlight glistened off a long white hair that had grown underneath her chin. Her mouth was agape: coffee-stained teeth and old fillings on display. This was all too intimate for me.

  I asked myself why I’d come. Dr. Bishop wouldn’t be able to talk or hear what I had to say. She was more or less a cyborg at this point. The path of her life from here on out had been reduced to sliding down the slope of a slow morphine drip
. Part of me had wanted to tell her that everything would be okay now. But sitting in a hospital chair, watching the respirator pump air slowly into her lungs, it was clear that everything would not be okay for her. She was on her deathbed. All the peace anyone could give her now came in the form of an opiate.

  I couldn’t bring myself to speak to her. I was too conflicted. Should I thank her for opening the world of Mindland up to me, for showing me that we’re not all alone in this world, that our minds can exist beyond our bodies so there’s real, scientific hope for an afterlife? Should I curse her for getting into my mind and convincing me to abandon my marriage and my life’s work just so I could kill some guy she needed dead? Should I mourn the destruction of her research into the collective unconscious or castigate her for meddling in affairs best left alone? Should I even bother speaking when I didn’t know what to say and she couldn’t hear anyway?

  I sat in the chair and watched the machines keep Dr. Bishop alive in only the most literal sense of the word. I breathed in rhythm with the respirator. I gradually nodded off and napped until my neck was sore.

  When I awoke, I was still alone in the room with Dr. Bishop. Just the two of us. I thought about apologizing for falling asleep alongside her deathbed, of explaining that I hadn’t been sleeping well lately because I’d been spending my nights in Mindland. But, of course, she’d been sleeping this whole time, too. There was no need to apologize.

  A slow trickle of yellow fluid filled a bag near the wall. Enough was enough. I used the wooden arms of the hospital chair to push myself up, stood alongside Dr. Bishop’s bed, and tapped the metal frame twice. “Lady,” I whispered, “you set me up.” Then I bent over and kissed her forehead.

  I spent the afternoon sitting in my office, winding up a toy bird, watching his beak creep close to the desk, watching his back flip. When the spring wound down, I wound it back up. I couldn’t seem to bring myself to do anything else. The phone rang. I saw before answering it that the call was coming from Dickinson and Associates. I thought it might be Frank Walters. By this point, a heavy dose of denial had kicked in and Walters was still alive in my mind. I answered the phone the way I always answered it: “Oak View State Psychiatric Hospital, Grant Writing Department.”

  “What did you do to Walters?”

  “Huh?”

  “We know it was you. What did you do to him?”

  The voice seemed familiar. More than familiar. It was a voice that I’d heard tell a hundred stories, sing a thousand songs. The voice had spent a lot of time rattling around in my ears, but I couldn’t place it. The caller ID was throwing me off. I asked, “Who is this?”

  “I’m asking the questions here. Come clean. Tell me everything you know about Frank Walters.”

  I could hear a giggle behind those last words. As soon as I realized that someone was trying to play a trick on me, I placed the voice. “What’s up, Brandon? Working for Dickinson and Associates now?”

  “Good old Dicks and Ass. It’s true. I made my pact with the devil. But did you hear?” Brandon paused.

  “Hear what?”

  “I’m not just working here. I’m running the fifteenth floor.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The day after that funeral we went to, your buddy Walters called me into his office. He offered me my old mentor’s position. It’s a big step up for me. If I play my cards right, I may even move up to the top level. Rub elbows with Mr. Dickinson and all his associates. Why the hell not? I’m still young.”

  “Congratulations,” I said. For a second, I worried about my old buddy. He’d been so harried with fear that he’d turn into his mentor, and now he was doing exactly that. On purpose. It didn’t make sense. And there was something else that didn’t make sense in my fog of denial. I asked, “But how are you running things? What about Walters? Isn’t he still the honcho of the mid-level?”

  “Not anymore. He was killed last night.”

  “Killed? What? Like an accident?” I asked, forcing myself to accept what I already knew.

  “Something like that. That crazy skinhead nephew of his burned down the house. Walters didn’t have time to get out.”

  “Wow. So ten days, you go from the art department to middle management. Crazy.”

  “Upper-middle management. But that’s not the half of it,” Brandon said. He told me about Ape Man calling him in the middle of the night. Brandon rushed straight out to Agoura Hills, found the fire department spraying the brush all around Walters’ property, the house still engulfed in flames but a lost cause. Ape Man sat on the curb surrounded by the police. Brandon couldn’t wedge his way into the conversation, so he made a middle-of-the-night call to a defense attorney whom Brandon had penned a jingle for. The guy was both a shyster and one of the top defense attorneys in Los Angeles. The perfect mix, according to Brandon. By 2:30 AM, Brandon, the defense attorney, and Ape Man sat together in an interrogation room at the Lost Hills Sheriff Station. Brandon insisted on being part of the meeting. “Information,” Brandon told me. “It’s the most valuable commodity in business today.”

  “And what information did you get?” I asked.

  “You think I’m just going to tell you what I had to pay a lawyer $360 an hour to find out? Never.”

  “It’s okay by me,” I said. I’d already been in all three of their minds: Brandon, Ape Man, and Walters. With or without the footlocker in the bowling alley, I could go back. Into Ape Man’s and Brandon’s mind, anyway.

  “Your name kept coming up,” Brandon said.

  “Really?” I wound up the little bird, just as a way of keeping distracted enough to sound nonchalant. He crept down toward the desk. “Are you sure it was me? I have a pretty common name.”

  The wind-up bird did a back flip.

  “Oh, I know who Connor was talking about,” Brandon said. “What were you involved in?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “We had a psychologist here who was batty. She had all these dreams about mental telepathy, that kind of thing. Walters bought into it. It was insane. I think he killed my dog.”

  Brandon ignored my last comment. He asked, “Who was the shrink?”

  “A woman named Dr. Bishop.”

  “Can I schedule an appointment with her?”

  “I doubt it.” I told Brandon that I’d been to the hospital that morning to visit her, and that there wasn’t even enough of her left to say goodbye to.

  “Maybe I’ll come up your way for a funeral. Repay the favor.”

  “No need,” I said. “I won’t even go to the funeral myself.” I was lying, of course. I’d go to the funeral, but the last thing I wanted was Brandon standing next to me, trying to sniff out information about Mindland while I tried to decide whether or not to cry.

  “What do you think of it all?” Brandon asked.

  “About the telepathy stuff? Walters?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I already told you. It’s insane.”

  “Hmmm.” Brandon seemed to chew on this for a few seconds. I didn’t say anything. I could hear weird white noises on the other end of the line: shuffling papers or scratching stubble or something. “Well,” Brandon said to buy more time, to fill the line with a few more white noises, then, finally, “Maybe we could meet up for lunch.”

  Brandon offered to take me to the same chain restaurant where Walters had taken me on our first meeting. Oh, no. Here we go again.

  37

  The best thing about Brandon’s call was that it served as a warning. Sooner or later, the police would pay me a visit. They did it sooner.

  Two days after Ape Man burned down the house, a visitor stopped by my office. I was in the middle of a follow-up call to a state agency about a land grant. If everything went through, the hospital would take over several acres of farmland on the western edge of the facility. It was all part of my dream of making Oak View as self-sufficient as possible. The first step: having the patients farm their own food. I was so swept up in this possibility that when the unk
nown man walked in, I just put up a finger and finished my call. The next few minutes were spent discussing annual precipitation figures and environmental impact studies, which were done back in the Winfield days but seemed recent enough for the initial planning stage. I told the director of the state agency, “Think of the old Victory Gardens from the World War II era. I’m proposing Victory Gardens for the patients here.”

  The director seemed to love this last line. He sounded more excited by the metaphor than all the facts, figures, and economic projections I’d been sending him. I expected as much. That’s why I spent so much time coming up with the metaphor and linking it to the time that most Americans think of as the apex of our culture. The director was so taken that he emailed me all the proper forms while we were still on the phone. He even gave me his direct extension and scheduled a time for a future telephone discussion. I noted the time in my increasingly full calendar.

  During this phone call, I kept one eye on the unknown man waiting in my office. Truth be told, I didn’t even entertain the possibility that he might be a detective. He didn’t match my image of what a detective is supposed to look like. He didn’t have a noticeably cheap suit, tobacco-stained fingers, cigarette ashes rubbed into polyester slacks, barber hairstyle #2, or mismatched socks. He didn’t even have a perpetual scowl on an indeterminately middle-aged face. This guy couldn’t have looked more different. He wore hippie sandals, cargo shorts, and an aloha shirt. He scratched his chin as he flipped through the paperbacks on my shelves, lingering over the words long enough to demonstrate a genuine interest in them. He also appeared to be a few years younger than me: early thirties at the oldest.