Madhouse Fog Read online

  Also by Sean Carswell

  Train Wreck Girl

  Barney’s Crew

  Glue and Ink Rebellion

  Drinks for the Little Guy

  Madhouse

  Fog

  Sean Carswell

  Manic D Press

  San Francisco

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and locations appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, and places is purely coincidental.

  Cover photo by Nino Andonis

  Madhouse Fog ©2013 by Sean Carswell. All rights reserved.

  Published by Manic D Press. For information, contact Manic D Press,

  PO Box 410804, San Francisco CA 94141 www.manicdpress.com

  ISBN 978-1-933149-75-2 (print) printed in the USA

  ISBN 978-1-933149-76-9 (ebook)

  Cataloging in Publication data is available from the Library of Congress

  for

  Wendy Bishop, Sheila Ortiz Taylor,

  and

  Jerome Stern

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  1

  I’d been hearing a voice in my head lately. Not voices. One voice, and I didn’t want to listen. It still somehow convinced me to take a job at the Oak View State Psychiatric Hospital.

  The first thing I did on arrival at Oak View was to take a seat in the back row of a large lecture hall. All of the hospital administrators and a good chunk of staff were having the beginning-of-the-year meeting there. I sat between two empty chairs and scanned the hall for Dr. Bishop.

  Despite what the voice in my head might tell you, I was not a patient at the hospital. I was a new employee. Dr. Bishop had hired me to write the grants needed to keep this facility humming.

  All the other voices in my head—which were all mine; I usually refer to them as thoughts—had told me to stay in Fresno, to find a way to breathe life back into my suffocating marriage, to keep writing grants that would fund the community space I’d helped to create and dedicated fifteen years of my life to running. For some reason, I listened to Dr. Bishop’s voice. I took this job at Oak View and joined the staff at the staff meeting.

  An exceptionally short woman sat down next to me. She said, “You must be Mr. Brown.”

  She offered her tiny hand for me to shake. I shook it. It felt like a canary in my palm.

  “I am. How’d you know?”

  She swept her bangs sideways above her right eyebrow. “I know that everyone else in here is not Mr. Brown so I made an educated guess.”

  I nodded.

  She said, “I’m Dr. Benengeli.”

  I didn’t exactly follow. I thought she was giving me a first and last name but she didn’t strike me as a Ben. I asked her to repeat her name. It didn’t help. I asked, “Is your first name Ben or Benen?”

  She said, “Mr. Brown, on hospital grounds, my first name is Doctor.”

  I winced as if I’d been scolded.

  She patted my forearm. “We don’t use first names on hospital grounds. This way it’s tougher for former patients to Google us and drop by our homes in the evening.”

  Before I could respond, her phone buzzed. She read the screen and started typing with her thumbs. I went back to scanning the lecture hall.

  Dr. Bishop had emailed me and told me she’d be there. I knew a few things about her. I knew what she looked like from the first time we had met a decade and a half earlier. I knew what her voice sounded like over the telephone and what it sounded like in my head without the telephone’s electrostatic buzz. I knew she used Verdana as her chosen email font and had email stationary with a George Burns quote that said, “The most important thing is sincerity. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” None of these things helped me to pick her out among the nurses and medical doctors and psychiatrists and psychologists and administrative assistants populating this meeting. All I saw was a bunch of too-ordinary-looking employees: sweaters and slacks and big cups of coffee and worn down briefcases and hard shoes and falling socks.

  In the room behind me, the chief of staff and a couple of IT guys worked furiously to get the computer and overhead projector to speak to each other. The screen at the front of the room flickered with their successes and failures. Most of the staff chatted with each other or talked on their phones or texted. At least three women knitted. Another woman read a paperback. She was brutal about it, folding it in half at the spine as if it were a magazine, really taxing the glue that bound the paper together.

  Amidst this scene, The Professor appeared. Who could he be but a professor, with his bow tie, starched dress shirt, v-neck sweater vest that was maroon (of all colors), blue blazer, pleated tan slacks, argyle socks, and fuzzy bedroom slippers? He walked to the front of the lecture hall, stood in front of the podium, mimed the actions of opening a briefcase and placing his notes on the podium, and said, “Good morning, class.”

  The staff quieted down somewhat. A low murmur buzzed through the hall. Everyone looked at everyone else, perhaps waiting for someone to do something. Glances ricocheted off one another. No one took action.

  The Professor spread his arms as if to hug the entire hall and boomed, “Can I get a huzzah?”

  One of the knitters paused mid-stitch to shout back, “Huzzah!”

  “All right!” The Professor stepped away from the podium. “One student is awake this morning. And it’s okay if you’re half-asleep because we’re here to talk about that realm between sleeping and waking.” He put his arms behind his back and paced in front of the screen. The light of the overhead projector flickered on. It broadcast an error message, then faded away. The Professor drifted into a lecture about Chuang-tzu and his famous butterfly dream. The story was familiar to me and far less interesting than The Professor’s conviction. He seemed convinced that he was really in front of a classroom, really teaching a class at this moment.

  I have to say I got a little excited. This was exactly the type of madness I was hoping to find with my new job at a psych hospital. Several of the staff were less amused. They pulled out cell phones and put their thumbs to work, either dialing or texting psych techs. Dr. Benengeli leaned over and whispered, “Well, this wasn’t on the agenda.”

  “Should I go down and put a stop to this? Escort this guy somewhere?” I asked.

  She shook her head and patted my knee. “Relax. Sometimes things don’t go as planned.”

  I met her glance and smiled. How could I not? Look at those eyes. Such a deep, rich brown, like an old rosewood fretboard.

  The Professor continued his lecture. He recited a Chuang-tzu poem:

  “The one who dreams of drinking wine,

  In the morning may be crying.

  The one who dreams of crying,

  In the morning may go hunting.”

  I actually recognized this poem. I’d majored in Religion, with a focus on Eastern Studies way back in the college days. The final lines of the poem rang in my head. I raised my hand. The Professor pointed at me. “Yes? You in the back row.�
��

  I recited the last two lines: “This kind of talk / Its name is ‘bizarre.’”

  Dr. Benengeli whispered in my ear, “You said it.”

  Several staff members shot me dirty looks.

  The Professor smiled and said, “Someone did his homework.”

  Before he could say more, the screen behind him reflected the image of a PowerPoint display: a fake notebook page with a pencil in the corner and a computerized script reading Happy New Year!

  Another man emerged from a doorway in the front of the lecture hall, just to the left of the screen. He wore the uniform—boots, blue slacks, work shirt, and polyester jacket—of a Roads and Grounds employee. He walked up to The Professor, touched him gently on the elbow, and muttered in his ear. The Professor nodded. “I apologize,” he told us. “Today’s class will be cancelled. Be sure to consult the syllabus for Thursday’s reading.”

  The Professor and the Roads and Grounds guy headed for the exit. A psych tech in his scrubs waited there. The three walked into the crisp January day.

  The meeting ended at 10:30, which gave me more than six hours to figure out what to do on my first day of work. The staff ambled out of the lecture hall. I sat there searching for a bright idea and waiting for Dr. Bishop. When neither emerged, I moseyed out of the hall, too.

  I wasn’t prepared for the winter day that greeted me outside. It was one of those coastal Southern California days that looks so beautiful when you see it through a window but when you step into it, it’s wet and cold. The wind cut through my skin. I wasn’t wearing the right clothes for this. Or more precisely, I did own the right clothes. I had jeans and hoodies and even a leather motorcycle jacket with a rusty X-Ray Spex pin on the lapel, but none of these were going to help on my first day of work in a professional setting. And though I’d been more or less a “professional” during my whole time working at the community space in Fresno, I was my own boss. I could dress however I wanted. This new job at an institution was different. I felt like I needed a uniform of sorts. So I dug out my tan Dickies slacks and a white dress shirt that someone had left at my house years ago. The shirt hung loose on me in that hand-me-down way. I probably didn’t look very professional. I probably looked like my dad was a professional and I raided his closet, dressing up as him for Halloween. My brown loafers had dust in the seams.

  Dr. Benengeli looked professional. She came up to me, warm and confident on this January day, wearing a stylish wool pea coat she’d probably picked up in the juniors’ section of an upscale department store. She said to me, “You look lost.”

  “I am, a little,” I said.

  “A psych hospital is a bad place to look lost. Someone will find a room for you, sooner or later.”

  And don’t you know that’s exactly what I was thinking.

  Dr. Benengeli nodded vaguely in the direction of some buildings to the east of the hospital. “Come on, I’ll show you to your office.”

  “I’m waiting for Dr. Bishop,” I said.

  She nodded. “Dr. Bishop isn’t here today. She asked me to show you around.”

  I paused a second to chew over this information. Dr. Benengeli started walking without me. I said, “Wait.” She stopped walking and turned to face me. “If you’re supposed to show me around, why’d you let me wander out here, lost?”

  She smiled. “Just to mess with you,” she said. Those beautiful eyes of hers made her smile all the more sinister.

  We walked together across the hospital campus. The grounds were a bit of an anomaly with their red brick and white wood buildings, their ancient black oaks and white firs and ficus trees that cast enough shade to house a small village underneath. The whole place looked more like the campus of an Ivy League university than a Southern California psych hospital. I’m sure that if elms could’ve survived drinking only the fog of this dry, rocky valley surrounded by cacti-covered hills, someone would’ve planted them. I’d researched the facility before all my phone and email interviews just to get a sense of what I was getting into. Nothing told me about the history of this place. It was a new facility but the buildings and some of the trees looked more than a century old. I asked Dr. Benengeli about it.

  She said, “This place used to be Winfield University.”

  “Really?” I had heard a little bit about Winfield U, but only a very little. RW Winfield was some kind of 19th century plutocrat. Made his money on railroads or oil or steel or something. Probably most of the money came from shady government deals and exploited workers. He had started this university at the end of his life. That was about all I knew. I said, “I thought Winfield University was still up and running. It closed down?”

  “Of course,” Dr. Benengeli said. “There was a big scandal and everything.”

  “Really?” I said again. I couldn’t imagine something so scandalous that it would close a university, especially a fancy private one like Winfield.

  “It actually had to do with old RW Winfield,” Dr. Benengeli told me. “Apparently, some of the students claimed he was haunting the dorms. No one paid much attention. Students at old schools are always talking about ghosts. But then the stories became more and more commonplace. Old Man Winfield’s ghost would pop up and shout at kids making out in the arboretum. He’d be seen wandering the halls late at night. He’d sneak into the girls’ dorm and chase co-eds from room to room.” She waved her hands vaguely in the direction of a cluster of buildings to the east. Perhaps these had been the girls’ dorms. Perhaps she just spoke with her hands.

  A cool wind sifted through my white dress shirt. I crossed my arms against the chill. “You’re pulling my leg,” I said.

  Dr. Benengeli’s eyes got big. She kept walking across the thick carpet of grass, talking. “That’s what most people thought,” she said. “A lot of locals would come by to see if they could catch a glimpse of the ghost. These four kids in particular showed up in their van, trying to hunt the ghost down. And for some reason, the ghost went right after them. Scared the hell out of their dog.”

  “Oh, yeah?” I said. The van and the dog were too much. I’d spent enough time as a little kid with a big bowl of cereal and Saturday cartoons to recognize the plot of a Scooby Doo episode when I heard it. I played along. “Only it turned out that the ghost wasn’t a ghost at all, right? It was a local land developer who wanted to put up a strip mall where this university was.”

  “Exactly,” she said. “And he would have gotten away with it, if not for those meddling kids.”

  I laughed. We wandered past a small concert shell with a stage just the right size for student productions. The concrete floor of the stage was worn smooth like the seat of an old rocking chair. “What really happened to close this place?” I asked.

  Dr. Benengeli smiled again. “Oh, it’s fucked up. It is a crazy story.” Apparently such a wild story that Dr. Benengeli needed to add a third syllable to “crazy” when she said the word. She shook her head. “If you don’t know about the scandal,” she said, “I’m not going to be the one to tell you.”

  Fair enough. It would all come in time.

  I gathered that Dr. Benengeli felt like blowing off work for most of the morning because she showed me every nook and cranny of the hospital grounds. She walked me through the therapy rooms, the doctors’ offices, the medical hospital, the gym, the cafeteria, the Alzheimer’s lab, the arboretum, the cottage once inhabited by the robber-baron himself RW Winfield, the psychiatric technician school, the post office, the library, the art gallery, the different dorms that housed patients according to their varying degrees of craziness, the chapels and synagogues and confessional booths, the archives, the canteen, the administration buildings, the Roads and Grounds office, the volleyball courts, the swimming pool, and the weight room. When it was all done, we headed in the direction of my office in the Williams Building.

  “Your office,” she told me, “is just behind the dual diagnosis dorm.” She explained that “dual diagnosis” meant patients suffered from both addiction and menta
l illness. “It’s not as bad as it sounds,” she said. “We like to pathologize everything these days. We can always find a diagnosis for you if you need one.”

  “That’s what the voices in my head keep telling me,” I said.

  “Right? Psychotic Disorder NOS.” Dr. Benengeli opened the door to the dual diagnosis ward and led me through. We passed a therapy room with a group session in progress. I peeked inside. The patients looked like the type of crowd you’d find at the county fair: overweight men in overalls, middle-aged women with thick makeup and cheap hair dye, skinny young women with exposed midriffs, skinny young men with flat-brim hats and sunken eyes, old men with the chalky skin of day laborers. They slumped in plastic chairs and lit one cigarette off another and sucked on coffee in styrofoam cups. I paused a second too long because there, in the middle of this group, with her own sad eyes and styrofoam cup, was Lola Diaz: the second woman I ever loved.

  Dr. Benengeli grabbed my elbow. “Quit gawking,” she said. “It’s time for us to get back to work.”

  2

  On my first day off from the psych hospital, I bought work clothes. I was aware all the while of Thoreau’s warning to beware of the enterprise that requires new clothes. I was also aware that Thoreau’s mother baked him cookies while he was living out on Walden Pond. And Ralph Waldo Emerson—or Thoreau’s aunt or mom, depending on where you get your story—paid Thoreau’s taxes when he was in jail for not paying them. Since I had no one but myself to bake me cookies and pay my taxes, I couldn’t be too wary of this enterprise. Since I didn’t want to walk around for weeks smelling like a discount department store or from the body odor of days gone by, I gathered my new clothes and old clothes, and walked down to the laundromat.

  This was a particularly tough day because it was the day my dog was going to die. My dog lived with my wife back in Fresno. I wanted to be there. For her. For him. I wanted to see him one last time and hold my wife when she cried but I couldn’t find a bus or train or any other conveyance making its way from where I lived on the Southern California coast out to inland Fresno. So, on my dog’s last day, I walked down the hill from my apartment to the nearest laundromat. I stacked my clothes on empty washers, slid dollars into a machine that gave me quarters, and slid those quarters into washers that filled with water. I filled them with detergent and clothes and the laundry bag that held the clothes. When the washers were loaded, I sat on a white plastic chair between the laundromat’s front door and its side door. Santa Ana winds blew in one door and out the other. I leaned back, opened a book, stared at the words, and thought about my dog and my wife.