Madhouse Fog: A Novel

By Sean Carswell

In this metaphysical thriller, a thirty-something punk rocker fleeing a troubled marriage is hired for a grant writing job at a southern California psychiatric hospital. When he gets tangled up in a neuropsychiatrist's mysterious research and is subsequently targeted by a nefarious advertising executive, the situation spins dangerously out of control.

Sean Carswell is the author of four books. His work has appeared in numerous publications including Thrasher and The Southeast Review. He co-founded Razorcake magazine and Gorsky Press. He currently lives in Ventura, California, and is a professor of American literature at California State University Channel Islands.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manic D Press, Inc.
• Release date: Jul 29, 2013
• ISBN: 9781933149769

Sean Carswell

SEAN CARSWELL is an associate professor of English at the California State University, Channel Islands.

Book preview

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 mental 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.

The dog’s name was Nietzsche. He was so old that he dated back to a time in our shared life when my wife and I were too young and stupid to realize how pretentious it was to name your dog after a philosopher, much less a German one with five consecutive consonants in his last name. That would put our adoption of Nietzsche at the summer between our freshman and sophomore years at Fresno State. If you count the years backwards from the time of this story to that particular shared summer, and then apply those years to Nietzsche’s life, you’d realize that he was nearly eighteen years old. He had a permanent scab on his back just north of his tail. His hair matted up as it dried from his bath. He could not see. He could not hear. He was able to digest less than half the food he ate. The rest of the food came out as vomit or diarrhea. Since his hip was pretty much shot and he couldn’t walk too well, he generally lay around within a few feet of this vomit or diarrhea. He smelled like death. It was time.

The only thing keeping the poor Nietzsche alive was my wife’s love and her patience with the necessity of cleaning up his vomit and diarrhea daily. I had loved Nietzsche, too. I saw him as a portal into greater things in my life when we first adopted him. As his health deteriorated, Nietzsche came to be a reminder of my own mortality and the futility of life. He also came to represent all of my life’s failures.

I sat in that laundromat and thought about Nietzsche and my failures until the washer cycled through and I transferred my clothes to the dryer. I returned to my white plastic chair between the Santa Anas and stared at the blurred ink on my paperback.

A young woman came into the laundromat at this point. Her hair had been dyed Jayne Mansfield platinum, her bangs cut high across her forehead. They were dyed black. She wore a little white dress tailored to look like something from a ’40s stag magazine. Her high heels clumped across the laundromat linoleum. A barbed wire tattoo wrapped around her ankle. The Santa Ana winds blew through her sheer dress. Goosebumps formed on her pale legs. She plopped her clothes on the three washers closest to me. My glance drifted back to the blurred ink of the paperback. My mind returned to the chart of the typical American lifespan.

If you’re tracking this with me, you’ll see a couple in their mid-thirties. They have graduated from a state university. They’re both gainfully employed. They have health insurance, vision benefits, and retirement plans. They’ve shared a dog for nearly eighteen years. This should be a time in their lives when they’ve proven that they can be nurturing, that they’re responsible enough to have a life dependent upon them for food, shelter, etc. They’ve garnered stability. At this point, they should be focused on taking the next step: breeding. Instead, you see the couple living in two towns separated by hundreds of miles. One half of the couple takes the responsibility of killing the dog (humanely; it’s the best thing for the dog after all). The other half sits in a laundromat washing the new clothes he needed for his first job in a mainstream, white-collar environment. Inspect this development chart more closely. You may realize that, by now, the couple should be four or five years beyond this point. There should be a child. Nietzsche’s demise should coincide with the child’s adventures in kindergarten. At the very least, there should be a washing machine and dryer at home and laundromats should be a romanticized memory of the lean, post-college days. You may look at me, the one in the laundromat with discount department store clothes, and cast the blame. This would not be the right time to defend myself. I would be too distracted.

I snapped out of the chart and my blame when I saw a vague white fluttering in the far right recesses of my peripheral vision. The Santa Anas played with the pin-up girl’s white skirt. It floated up her pale, goose-bumped thighs. She set down her detergent and flattened her skirt. I glanced lower down her leg, watched that barbed wire tattoo twist around her ankle. That barbed wire allowed me to do more math. An unspoken fashion moratorium must have passed on the barbed wire band tattoo sometime around 1995… ’96 at the latest. It reached the apex of its popularity, though, around ’92. The recipient of a barbed wire band tattoo would likely be no younger than eighteen, no older than twenty-three. Looking at median numbers, factoring standard deviations, discarding data too wildly errant to be relevant, I decided that this woman would likely be around my age. Around my age and also at a laundromat, but wearing high heels and a sheer dress that was no match for the January California winds. Her development chart had to be lagging behind mine. I tried to take a little comfort in that and returned my gaze to the paperback.

It was no use trying to read. Nietzsche was surely dead at this point. My life compared to a pin-up laundromat girl meant little to me. I worried more about my life compared to what I wanted, what I dreamed, where I found meaning under this crushing wave of mortality. At what point would I be broken-hipped, blind, deaf, picking at perpetual scabs, and sleeping next to my own vomit? Will someone have the humanity to put me to sleep? Will I have the courage to accept an end to this life? Did Nietzsche know where he was going this morning? Did he shake and quiver in my wife’s arms? Did she wrap him in a blanket and try to convince herself that Nietzsche was shaking because of the cold, not because of the great unknown he was facing? Did that white dress just flutter up higher?

I shot my glance over just in time to see the pin-up girl’s hand smoothing her dress down. Surely, the corner of my eye didn’t deceive me. Surely, the Santa Anas had swept that dress high enough for me to realize—despite my fractured consciousness—that the pin-up girl was not wearing underwear. Surely, it was better that I didn’t see it. This woman deserved her privacy. She didn’t need some sad psych hospital grant writer with a dead dog staring at her ass.

I kept my eyes glued to the paperback that my mind wouldn’t let me read. I told myself that my eyes needed to stay there because this young woman deserved her privacy, that she should be afforded the opportunity to sort her laundry into three machines without my lecherous stares. To be more honest, though, I kept my stares off her because I was convinced that people could feel it when you stare at them. A breeze grazes their necks. Their scalps feel lighter. They know. They look around to see who’s looking. I didn’t want this to happen to her, either for her own comfort or because the wind still blew through the laundromat doors. Either one.

I set my paperback down on the white plastic table adjacent to me and my white plastic chair. I picked up the paperclip I’d been using as a bookmark. I used it to dig at the dead skin around my cuticles. I thought of Nietzsche. The breeze picked up. My glance shot over. All mysteries were solved. The pin-up girl was not wearing underwear. Her hands were occupied with the sorting of her laundry. She let the wind blow and her dress flutter. She effectively, maybe unconsciously, mooned me. I watched until I felt a bit embarrassed. My mind drifted. My eyes followed the waves of the dress as it floated like a white streamer trapped between the wind and a tree branch. I wanted to look away, but at the core I was still a heterosexual male of the species, prone to all of the instincts inherent to my role in the animal kingdom. The wind died down within a few seconds anyway.

My mind kept fluttering, wondering if it meant anything that the dog named after the man who declared God dead was now dead himself, wondering if any of this added up to anything. Wondering why I hadn’t just rented a car and driven to Fresno. This last thought killed the breeze in my mind because it seemed every other time in my life, I would have acted that way. I could imagine no point in my life when I would not have accompanied my wife in the task of taking Nietzsche on his final journey to the vet. But this time, for some reason, it was like someone had gotten into my head and insisted I stay here. It was that voice—the one that sounded like Dr. Bishop’s—motivating me to act against the way I typically acted. Thinking about this hurt. It sent my eyes back to the pages of the paperback. I still couldn’t make out the letters.

Then the wind picked up. It inflated her dress to the point where I could see above her ass. I could see the dimples where her lower back tied into her pelvis. Again, the pin-up girl did nothing to smooth her skirt or fight the wind. She dropped a handful of quarters into her washer. She selected the proper water temperatures. I wondered if perhaps she could feel my glance, if she knew and she was letting it happen, if she wanted me to look. A wave of anxiety crashed on the shores of my stomach. I swam under it. After all, this wasn’t a situation that required anything of me. I was married. I was happy enough about it. If I had been single, I would’ve felt the pressure to talk to this woman, to invite her to the coffee shop down the road, to buy her a pastry and listen to her life, to maybe get wrapped up in all the drama promised by someone who wore high heels to a laundromat and unabashedly advertised one of the most embarrassing tattoos from the early ’90s. As things stood, I enjoyed a flash of divinity. My dryer buzzed. I pocketed my paperback and went to fold laundry.

Tall double-washers stood between me and the pin-up girl. She picked up her gossip magazine and pink laundry basket, and sat down in the white plastic chair I’d just vacated. She was no longer visible through the double washers. I folded my laundry. I dwelled again on the thoughts of my wife taking the responsibility that I dodged, on the distance between me and Fresno, on my uncharacteristic inability to be in Fresno at this crucial moment, on the fact that I’d spent a hundred dollars on three pairs of slacks, five button-up shirts, and a brown belt to match my dusty loafers. The next day would be Sunday. I’d go to the psych hospital to feel less lonely and use their computer to search out more funding possibilities, to find something to distract me from the death of Nietzsche.

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