Читать книгу Madhouse Fog - Sean Carswell - Страница 9

3

The residents of the dual diagnosis dorm were on an afternoon smoke break when I arrived on hospital grounds. There was something lopsided about the whole group. They were like an oft-patched bicycle inner tube held together by bulky squares, stretched thin at the weak points, full of a wary optimism that this dried-out, cracked old rubber could hold it all together if it just had the right tire wrapped around it, if it were only asked to maintain the right amount of pressure and no careless or cruel bastard came along to over-inflate it. I had a smile and nod at the ready for the lot of them.

One young white guy in a FUBU sweatshirt held my glance so long that I felt like I had to say something. “Hi.”

He replied, “’Sup,” and kept looking.

I took this as an invitation to cross the line past what was likely appropriate, considering my probationary status as an employee and my perhaps shaky status as a husband now that my wife was balking on making the few-hundred-mile move to Southern California. I said to him, “Lola’s not taking her smoke break, huh?”

“Who?”

“Lola Diaz?”

“She a nurse or something?”

“A patient.”

The dude shook his head. “Ain’t no beaners in this dorm.”

I winced, either at the word “beaner” or at the usually repressed notion that something about me in my white skin and discount department store clothes suggested that I was an okay guy to say “beaner” around. I thought about making a comment about his comment and taking this conversation to the next level. I stopped myself when I realized that this dude was a patient at a mental hospital. “A patient,” I told myself. “In a mental hospital.” Besides that, he was a white guy in a FUBU shirt. I let it all slide, cut through the dual diagnosis dorm, and headed for the Williams Building.

Originally, the Williams Building had been built on the bottom of a hill. Small white Doric columns framed the entranceway. The building stretched three stories above the classical entranceway, its ancient brick bleached by the California sun, reinforced by rusty sand filling in porous gaps, and worn smooth by Pacific winds. The original building carried an addition the way a horseshoe crab carries its young. The addition stretched halfway up the hill, supported by newer brick, flanked by newer windows, topped by a black shingle roof that was sloped slightly steeper than the original. Sunlight bounced off the ghost of a long-forgotten contractor who surely must have put an arm around a cost-conscious university president saying, “We can save you thousands of dollars this way and who’s gonna know the difference? You and me. That’s it.” And perhaps a younger ghost of that older university president was looking at the finished addition, thinking, No. Everyone will notice. All in all, the building didn’t look too bad. Another twenty years of sun and dirt and wind might even the score.

The toughest thing about the addition came from the building’s inside layout. The Williams Building was four stories high but it had eight different levels. Nine, if you counted the basement. The first floor of the original building was roughly six feet lower than the first floor of the newer building. All of the ceilings were about twelve feet high. The hallways from the newer building didn’t exactly match up with the older hallways. Shrinking faculty offices, wide open halls for lectures, subdivided rooms for graduate assistants, and reroutes through the old classrooms that had been cut into newer, smaller ones added to the overall maze of the guts of the Williams Building. Six-foot stairways would surprise me. Halls would lead to dark recesses yet to be remodeled for the building’s new job in the psych hospital. Simple errands during my first week caused me to pause and reflect on who might own a complete blueprint of this building and whether he’d sell me that blueprint. At times, I dreamed of drawing the Williams Building treasure map and placing a giant red X on my office. I toyed with the idea of bringing string to work, letting it unravel from the front door to my office. Breadcrumbs seemed too unreliable. My office was on the third and a half floor.

I wound my way through the Williams labyrinth, counting my steps. Twelve paces to the right to reach the stairway, up four levels of stairs, then to the left. I fumed about that cracked inner tube of a kid calling the second girl I’d ever loved a “beaner.” I cut through the interns’ lounge and counted seven more steps to the left. I tried to remind myself that I have to give people more leeway in a psych hospital. That argument didn’t work. I still fumed. I successfully reminded myself that those last seven steps to the left were always a mistake and turned around, repairing those seven mistaken steps and adding an additional thirteen to them before reaching another half-stairway that led me to the familiar right turn into what on Sundays was apparently a dark hallway. For whatever reason, this reminded me of Nietzsche again. The dog, not the philosopher. I closed my eyes and counted my last steps thinking about the now-departed pup. At the count of eight, I opened my eyes again, turned to the right, and opened my office door.

The Professor sat there. He faced my desk, back to the door. He did not turn to look at me as I entered the office. I walked around my desk, sat in my chair, and faced him. “Professor,” I said, and smiled.

This is a problem of mine: I smile when I don’t know which emotion to express. I’ve been doing it at least since I was a little kid. I distinctly remember smiling when my mother told me that my grandmother—her mother—had died. Not because I wasn’t sad. I was very sad; I’d just lost my favorite grandparent. I was old enough at the time to know what death meant. I just wasn’t old enough to know what to do with that sadness and my mom usually cheered up if I gave her a smile. So I gave her an absolutely inappropriate smile.

Thirty years of life hadn’t taught me much about what to do with my sadness. The best I could come up with on this Sunday was a trip to a psych hospital and a smile for The Professor, who, to the best of my knowledge, was a patient with the potential to become dangerous.

The Professor stood and offered his hand. I stood and shook it. We both sat again. The Professor didn’t say a word. He regarded me. I took in his bow tie, his blue blazer, his maroon sweater vest, his crisp white shirt. Crumbs clung to the fuzz of his sweater vest, gathered along the little crest formed by his stomach when he sat. My eyes lingered on the crumbs. Toast? A Reuben for lunch, perhaps?

Time passed. That stupid smile stayed glued to my face.

Finally, The Professor said, “You must be the new grant writer.”

“I must be,” I said.

“Your timing couldn’t be better,” he said.

I waited for him to go on, but he didn’t. He seemed somehow smaller in that chair, facing my desk. In front of the lecture hall on that first day, The Professor had beamed with a well-honed stage presence. Or classroom presence. He’d had that style, that cool of a shy person in his element. Sitting in the chair across from me, he lost that style. His body language seemed to tell a familiar story about being on the wrong side of a desk in all the places we find ourselves in the smaller chair: when we’re sent to the principal’s office, when we buy insurance, when we file a report at the police station, when we petition a professor for a higher grade or a boss for a raise. A transference from all those small moments of supplication weighed down The Professor’s shoulders.

I didn’t like my position—that of a principal, an insurance salesman, a cop, an authority of any kind. I wanted to put him at ease but I didn’t know how. I watched him and kept waiting. When the pause stretched into the recesses of uncomfortable, I said, “How can I help?”

The Professor stroked the edge of his bow tie. “I’m sure I don’t need to tell you about the scandal.”

I shrugged. I hoped it was a vague enough gesture to get the three-syllable-crazy story from him. Apparently, The Professor read my shrug differently.

“Needless to say, Winfield University has seen better days. What this university needs is something dazzling, an academic statement that will reestablish us among the elite private universities on the West Coast. I propose to make this statement.”

I picked up a pencil from the cup on my desk. I rolled the pencil between the pads of my thumbs and forefingers on both hands. The Professor watched the pencil’s slow roll. His eyes met mine, looking for an answer. I said, “Please, go on?”

Perhaps it was a little cruel for me to humor The Professor in this way. Perhaps I should’ve led him back through the maze of the Williams building and into a psych tech’s arms. I couldn’t help myself. My life’s problems had gotten to the point where denial wasn’t working any more. I either needed to face them head on or find a distraction. The Professor seemed to be the perfect distraction.

“Now, I know you’re familiar with the works of David Hume. I recognized this when you visited my Monday lecture a few weeks back. I’m sure you’re aware of the fundamental ontological problems raised by Hume and other modern philosophers, going all the way back to Descartes.”

I was not, in fact, familiar with any of that. I’d never heard of David Hume. I didn’t know what the word “ontological” meant. I ran over the word in my mind, just to travel its ridges and humps. I said, “Sure. Sure. Go on.” Was that dopey smile still on my face? I’m sure it was.

“Well, I propose to solve that problem.” The Professor said this so definitively that, for a split second, I felt a little foolish for not coming up with this conclusion myself.

I responded the only way I could think to. “Great!”

The Professor stood and took two steps to my bookshelves. I’d taken my books with me when I moved down from Fresno. The shelves were full of a hodgepodge of books on Buddhism and Taoism, grant-writing manuals, political books that I’d likely never read, newer versions of mid-20th century crime paperbacks, contemporary Japanese fiction, a few classics whose spines knew no wear, one crazy novel about carpenters in Florida, and, let’s face it, a lot of junk. The Professor took his time examining the spines. He pulled out Thomas Merton’s translations of Chuang-tzu. “Have you heard the butterfly story?” he asked.

“Yep,” I said. “The guy couldn’t be sure if he was a man dreaming he was a butterfly or vice versa.”

“The transformation of things,” The Professor said. He clasped hands behind his back and started pacing. My office was only about ten feet wide. His paces were short. His classroom presence had returned. His transformation was complete.

“In essence, this question is endless. It doesn’t matter if it’s Chuangtzu wondering if he’s butterfly or man, or if it’s Descartes staring at his hands, wondering if they really are his hands. The result is the same. We learn that everything we believe to be real isn’t necessarily real. We pause for a second and wonder: if the past is gone, if the future has not yet happened, how can we be sure that our entire existence isn’t simply this moment right now? How do we know that we didn’t make up our past to explain our present? How do we know the future will resemble anything of the past?”

The Professor paused to look for my reaction. Who knows what my external expression was or what he read on my face? Internally, I liked the argument. I liked the idea that the whole universe could be wrapped up in this moment and my past could be a fiction. If it were all fictitious, if there were no past or future, I’d be off the hook. I could let it all float away and just enjoy this one moment: my own private philosophy lecture.

The Professor carried on. “Take you, for instance. You sit at that desk. You imagine yourself to be a grant writer employed by a private university. You have a vague sense that you went to a university yourself. You imagine memories of that university experience. Perhaps you have an idea of classes you took. Perhaps, when you dig through the crevices of your mind, you can unearth little treasures of knowledge from those classes. Perhaps you don’t even dig through these parts of your brain. Perhaps it’s something else, something personal. Your mind lingers on some problems with your love life, or with a sick child, or with unresolved feelings about your parents. Who knows? Maybe your dog just died. Anyway, you know you have this feeling of loss or longing. It’s vague. You don’t really understand where it comes from, so you assign it to a lover or child or parent or pet. But are they real? Are they here? Can you show me this loved one? Can you be certain that it’s not all a fiction you created in your mind? Maybe this isn’t a university at all. Maybe it’s a mental hospital. Maybe you’re an inmate…”

“Patient,” I said.

The Professor stopped pacing. “Excuse me?”

“Residents of psych hospitals are called ‘patients,’ not ‘inmates.’”

The Professor nodded and resumed pacing. “If your dream calls them ‘patients,’ we can go with that. Nonetheless, by any objective criteria, you cannot prove to yourself or me right now that any of it exists. The whole universe may have been created for this split second. There may be no past and no future. This may be everything.”

I nodded and smiled. If only that were the case.

“What’s the smile about?” The Professor asked.

“That idea,” I said, “of the past being an illusion and the future a false hope. It’s funny.”

“It’s not funny,” he said. “Not if you can’t prove otherwise.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “I trust that I witnessed my past, and the future will come along, more or less in the way I expect it to. Whether I want it to or not.”

“And what’s the basis for this trust?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“How do you know that this moment isn’t everything?”

“I don’t know.” But I did take a second to think about it. Okay, I figured, maybe there would be a bit of a respite if this moment were everything. Maybe it would be nice to relegate my past to a fiction and not deal with it. But I’d want the future part. Sad and lonely as I was feeling at this moment, I still had hope that things would get better. So I answered The Professor honestly. “It would suck if this moment were everything.”

“It would more than suck. It would drive you mad. It would be unbearable.”

I actually saw where he was going with this. “It would be so bad,” I said, “that I’d probably create a fictional past and a belief in the future, just to keep from going mad.”

“And so there’s no distinction.” The Professor pointed a finger to the sky, I guess to illustrate his point. “You can never know if there is any reality to reality, or if it’s all a fiction created to ward off madness.”

I leaned back in my chair. My pencil commenced its rolling between the pads of my fingertips. “This is the problem that you seek to solve?”

“Exactly.”

It was too much for me. Curiosity had completely taken over my better judgment. And besides, this discussion was proving to be exactly the distraction I was seeking. I asked, “How are you going to solve this problem?”

“A series of objective experiments to show that the world does not necessarily operate the way you imagine. Of course, I’d need funding. Which is where you come in. I have proposals, hypotheses, prospectuses, you name it. It’s all outlined and available for your perusal.” His pacing led him to the window behind me. He opened it. A gust of January filled the room. I spun my seat to watch him.

“I’d like to see it,” I said. I wondered for a second if these documents really existed, or if they were the elaborate pantomimes carried over from the front of the lecture hall.

The Professor snapped his fingers. I watched. He climbed out the window and floated away.

An hour later, the bare wood above the point of my pencil had turned black from pencil lead and the oil of my fingers. I continued to roll it between the pads of my fingers. I still sat in my chair, gazing out the closed window behind my desk. Of course, The Professor hadn’t really floated out of it. He couldn’t have. It’s not humanly possible. He walked out the front door of my office and counted his footsteps to the exit of the Williams Building. There was no other way to explain it.

Still, our conversation had my head reeling. How did I know anything? More particularly, The Professor seemed so genuine in his beliefs, so convinced these grounds were still part of a university and I was a university grant writer that I didn’t know what to think. Which one of us was the crazy one? Could it be that I was the patient? That there was no wife in Fresno, no Lola Diaz, no dead Nietzsche? I thought about the woman in the laundromat. Surely that had to be part of my overactive imagination, no? Surely American women at the beginning of the 21st century are more careful about exposing their backsides. Or…

Hmmm. I set the pencil down and turned to my computer. After several minutes of searching through the tangled lines of the internet, I found a story about Descartes. The story had been written by a professor and posted on his university web page. According to this professor, Descartes admitted that there were moments in his life when he spent so much time wrestling with these questions about existence and reality that he could actually make himself believe that his hands weren’t really his own. According to this professor’s web page, when Descartes had these crises of faith, he generally left his lonely office. Being around people seemed to hold these deeper questions at bay.

At this point in my day, I was leery of the stories professors tell and sick of these questions. I decided to find some people to be around. And preferably not psych patients. I stood and forced opened my window. It creaked. Dust and flecks of old paint fell.

Outside, a woman with gray hair and a dark business suit approached the Williams Building from the direction of the dual diagnosis dorm. I watched her approach. She waved to me. I waved back. She kept waving. I realized that she was signaling to me. I closed the window. It dropped smoothly. I counted my steps, winding my way down through the labyrinth.

The woman sat in a plush, dark leather chair in the front lobby of the building. “I’ve been meaning to meet you for a week,” she said.

“Oh?”

“Yes, indeed,” she said. “I’m Dr. Bishop.”

I gave her a broad smile and offered my hand. “It’s a pleasure.”

She grasped my hand. Her fingers were slim and cool as fresh asparagus.

“Did it seem sincere?” I asked.

“What’s that?”

My smile hadn’t waned. “My greeting. Do I seem sincerely pleased to meet you?”

“I suppose.”

“Good. I figure sincerity is everything. If I can fake that, I’ve got it made.”

She gave me a flustered look as if to say, “You are the grant writer, right? Not a patient?” But, no, I realized. Dr. Bishop was a professional. A psychologist. All of her facial expressions must be carefully calculated.

I explained myself. “The signature on your email. It’s that quote from George Burns. ‘Sincerity is everything…’”

Dr. Bishop smiled again. “Oh! I get it. A joke. I’m sorry. My secretary—ex-secretary—put that on my email. It was funny to her. A geeky psychologist joke. I can’t figure out how to get rid of it.” She pointed out the two plush chairs with her cool, slim fingers. “Please have a seat.”

I did. We discussed hospital business for the next half-hour: forms, departments, hierarchies, donors, social events that were encouraged, social events that could be ignored, insurance plans, retirement benefits, staff projects, research projects, administrators’ jurisdictions, the secretaries who really ran the joint, the charge nurses whose good sides I’d do myself a favor to get on, places to get office supplies, where to pick up the paycheck that had been waiting for me in payroll for 48 hours, Hawaiian shirt Fridays (the first of each month), vacation days and the best time to take them, and everything else that Dr. Bishop could think about. At the end of it all, she said to me, “You know, I’m not an administrator. I just volunteered to lead the search committee for a grant writer.”

I did know that and told her so.

She continued, “Which is one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you. I’ve been engaged in some recent fascinating research myself.”

I wasn’t sure I was ready to hear about it, what with my earlier encounter with The Professor and all. Besides that, I knew a bit about her and her research. I’d suspected as much when I was going through the hiring process, but now, sitting face-to-face with Dr. Bishop, I realized that I did know her. I’d experienced her research firsthand. It had been years ago but it wasn’t an event I was likely to forget. If she remembered me, she didn’t let on. Without dredging up the past, I prodded her into the present. “Oh, yeah?”

She paused. “Let’s not get into that now.” She patted my knee. “Do you like dogs?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Would you like a puppy?”

I laughed, surprised. “As a matter of fact, I would.”

Dr. Bishop clapped twice. Each clap was as sharp and definitive as a period at the end of a sentence. White space separated them. She said, “You look like a dog lover. And we just admitted a patient. A suicide attempt. When the paramedics picked him up, they found the saddest little dog in his apartment. Just a puppy. And, well, long story short, the patient is no longer with us. No longer among the living. But the puppy is living with me. My cats do not like him. He needs a new home. You’re the guy to give it to him.” Dr. Bishop popped out of her seat. She said, “Follow me.”

I had no idea what I was getting myself into.