Madhouse Fog. Sean Carswell

a body fresh from a teenage growth spurt. The womanly Lola Diaz comes up to the kid version of me at my locker. I brush my long hair out of my eyes. In my sixteen-year-old mind, I look like a Ramone with my tight jeans and leather motorcycle jacket and shaggy hair.

      With the perspective of the impossible number of years that had passed since then, I realized that I looked nothing like a Ramone and Lola didn’t care about the Ramones, anyway.

      In that pool of memory, she says to me, “I heard you were going to take me out to a diner for pie and ice cream after school.” Her cracking voice undermines the confidence of her words.

      I say, “You heard right,” trying hard to sound cool and failing to an equal degree.

      Out of that exchange, a first date was born. That first date doesn’t really swim in my shallow pool of memories. I remember more an amalgam of dates and meetings and times at the diners and slices of pie and doing everything we could do before six o’clock but never going out on an evening date with Lola. Not even on weekends.

      I remembered sixteen-year-old Lola asking me out as thirty-seven-year-old Lola led me across the psych hospital grounds toward the largely unused North Quad. Perhaps it had something to do with the way her hips swayed when she walked, so brazen and smooth that there had to be a Pandora’s box of insecurities behind this practiced confidence. Or maybe not. Maybe she was just walking. “Are you taking me to the Alzheimer’s lab?” I asked.

      “I don’t remember,” she said.

      She smiled to show me she was kidding. Crow’s-feet crinkled around her eyes, so striking for a mind that had barely updated Lola to an adult. I got the joke.

      Lola led me through a parking lot that held no cars. The pavement was worn down to that point where it couldn’t be smooth again. Tiny pebbles jutted out of the eroded tar. Weeds grew through cracks.

      Beyond the parking lot stood an ancient red brick dorm that hadn’t been renovated with the rest of the hospital. This dorm was so forgotten that the administration hadn’t mentioned it when they talked about finding funding for renovation of various hospital buildings. Lola stopped at the side entrance of the dorm. “I need you to open the door,” she said.

      I reached for the ring of keys on my belt. “I’m not sure if I can.”

      “It’s not locked. It’s just heavy.” Lola showed me how to grab the handle and told me to lift up, then pull out. I tried it. The door groaned under its own weight. Dust and flakes of weather-stripping rubber fluttered onto my hand. I pushed in with my shoulder and yanked up. The door broke free of the spontaneous seal of paint where its edge rested against the doorframe. I tugged the door back to me. It obeyed.

      Just as Lola said, the door was heavy. The main problem being a broken hinge on the top of the door. I gently let the door rest, its bottom edge on the concrete ramp leading to the entrance. The sun cut a broad swath of light down the otherwise dark hallway. Lola led the way inside.

      “This building was the art dorm back in the Winfield University days. I used to live here.”

      “You went to Winfield?” I said. It wasn’t a question so much as an inarticulate way of saying, “I didn’t know you went to Winfield.”

      Lola didn’t answer. She led me down the dark hallway. Both sides were flanked by barren rooms: closets without closet doors, linoleum floors stained where feet rested in front of long lost chairs and scuffed by the legs of desks and beds that had long been auctioned off. Only dust and spiders stayed in these rooms. Even the doors lacked doorknobs. We passed a former bathroom. A few bathroom stall walls still stood, but the sinks and toilets were gone, the plumbing capped off. The lobby adjacent to the stairway was equally naked. Not even the carpet remained. Just swirls of ancient glue stuck to the concrete floor.

      Lola climbed the first flight of stairs. “My room was on the third floor,” she said.

      “Is that where you’re taking me?”

      “No,” Lola said. “I don’t live there anymore.”

      We headed down the second floor hallway, directly above where we’d just come from. Without the light from the side door, I couldn’t see much. I asked myself the following two questions: is Lola a patient here? And, if so, is it advisable for me, an employee of the psychiatric institution, to walk down a dark, deserted hallway with a patient, particularly if said patient is the second woman I ever loved? I wrestled with the first question first.

      I figured that Lola must either be a patient or an employee. I hadn’t noticed her at the all-staff meeting on my first day, but it had been my first day and I had been nervous. Surely I hadn’t looked at everyone in that large lecture hall. And all the staff hadn’t been there anyway. I hadn’t seen her at any other employee function or in any of the places where the employees typically congregated to avoid the patients. There was the key test, too. Dr. Benengeli had told me on the first day that, if in doubt whether someone was a patient or an employee, look for keys. All of us employees carried a huge ring of keys so that we could get into and out of the various administration buildings. A huge ring of keys usually signified an employee. We were forever locking and unlocking doors. Sometimes patients picked up on this and did what they could to assemble a ring of lost keys. So the test wasn’t foolproof. Still, it worked well enough that the staff kicked up a fuss when the administration proposed replacing all the keys with a single key fob that could get you in and out of anywhere on site.

      Lola carried no keys. I couldn’t ignore this. Also, if I’m going to be honest here, I should admit that I’d searched the faculty directory for her name. Her name was not listed. Clearly the chances were less than fifty/fifty that she was an employee.

      I’d seen her in the group session in the dual diagnosis dorm on my first day. It was possible she was an intern sitting in on a group. If I really wanted to believe this, I guess I could make myself believe it. The evidence pointed otherwise so it seemed likely that Lola was a patient. Her presence in the dual diagnosis group session suggested that she was a high-functioning patient. That was a plus. Her presence there also suggested that she had some kind of chemical dependency as well as a mental illness. I added it up. Based on the information at my disposal, the answer to my two questions would have to be: yes and no. In that particular order.

      I walked behind Lola in that dark hallway, watching the brazen sway of her hips, and wondered what chemical she was dependent on. She had too much flesh around her bones, she was too full-figured of a woman to be addicted to speed or crystal meth or crack. Which was good. I wanted to eliminate those possibilities as soon as possible. Heroin was another possibility, but surely that would’ve been painted on her face right from the beginning. I would’ve noticed the tracks on her bare arms when she touched my wedding ring. I would’ve seen the sunken eyes when I met her glance. So what then? Marijuana. Maybe. It seemed far-fetched to think someone would need rehab for weed, but it didn’t even take a week at the psych hospital to learn that courts order rehab for potheads. And my last job in Fresno showed me that you don’t have to be physically addicted to a substance for it to deteriorate your life. So maybe weed. Cocaine was a possibility. If she were in the early stages of addiction, she could still have both a problem and all those curves. And, of course, there was always alcohol: the Occam’s Razor solution to this.

      Lola reached the end of the hallway. A sheet of plywood leaned against the window there. Lola grabbed one side and said, “Give me a hand. We’ll lean it up against the wall behind you.”

      “Got it,” I said. I picked up the plywood and moved it away from the window. The new light brought to life a series of icons and comics and colors and logos.

      “Now, I don’t want you to judge me by this,” Lola said. “I was in college. Fifteen years have passed. I’m much better now.”

      I nodded. “Did you do this?”

      “Guilty.”

      “I wasn’t expecting this at all.”

      “How very evasive of you to say.”

      “Give me a second,” I said.