Madhouse Fog. Sean Carswell

Like a breath of fresh air.

      The army changed the signs. This fractured all the sound bites around the protests. Everyone was happy. Well, except the protestors and the people who were tortured by WHISC alumni. But now they sounded like whiners because what more did they want? The SOA was closed. WHISC didn’t have that horrible history. Et cetera.

      At ten-thirty that morning, I’d had enough of my internet searches. I wasn’t sure what to believe and I didn’t really want to believe any of it. I wanted to shrink the world back down to my little office in the maze of the Williams Building, to federal grants and psych hospital patients and January California breezes. I wanted to think about my shallow pool of Folsom memories, afternoons whiling away in the Diaz family’s formal living room, sitting on an embroidered couch under wrought iron candleholders and a painting of San Juan city streets, watching Lola slide a Cure record into its sleeve, careful to touch only the edges of the record. Lola would spray all her records with rubbing alcohol and gently brush the grooves before putting them on the turntable. She would sit on the wooden living room floor, stare at the zigzag patterns of the area rug, and sing all the sad words of her favorite British pop stars. I had come to love music I would’ve otherwise hated, if only because each familiar wail made me feel like Lola was in the room.

      Piggy-backed on that memory, of course, was the old living room grandfather clock striking five-thirty, the harried look of Lola saying, “My dad will be home soon,” the rush of sweeping me out and clearing away any sign of my presence before her father’s six o’clock return time.

      I cracked open my office window to feel a little January breeze. A psych tech and The Professor strolled along the walkway that stretched between the Williams Building and the dual diagnosis dorm. I tried to imagine what The Professor might say about Dickinson and Associates. Would he tell me to question the sources, ask how reliable the websites of corporations, protestors, and business magazines really were? Would he take the larger road and ask me what it meant to develop a view of the world beyond my own, based upon the ephemeral words I read off a glowing screen? Would he chastise me for developing opinions about places I’d never go and people I’d never meet when all the while I couldn’t prove to him that my hands were really mine or that I was more than just a butterfly dreaming I was a grant writer?

      I needed to talk to people so I called an old bandmate of mine, a guy named Brandon Burch. Two things about Brandon Burch: 1. We’d been friends a long time ago, and as years stretched away from the original point of the friendship, I spent a lot of time questioning why we’d ever been friends; and 2. He worked down in Los Angeles on Wilshire Boulevard, where a bunch of advertising agencies are gathered. The area is known as the Miracle Mile, though there is no miracle about that stretch of Wilshire Boulevard, and it’s not a mile long.

      Brandon was in his office and picked up on the second ring. First things first, we dealt with small talk. “What’s up with you?” Brandon asked. “Still trying to save the world?”

      “Nope,” I said. In a way, even answering the question was a confession that I had once been trying to save the world. I did not intend to make such a confession. I didn’t believe it to be true. I never lived through a period so idealistic that I thought I—the wannabe Ramone from Folsom—could save the world.

      “So you’re not at the nonprofit anymore?”

      “Nope.”

      “What was it again? A hippie commune?”

      And, see, this was exactly why I wondered how I’d ever become friends with a guy like Brandon Burch. He knew that I’d worked at a community space, that there was nothing hippie about it, and that we weren’t trying to save the world. We held free resume-writing workshops for blue-collar people, provided lunch for the homeless, hosted art exhibits and poetry readings for the Fresno State students. That kind of thing. I was the only employee of the space, and I only got a salary because I wrote the grant that gave me the salary. And, truth be told, I wrote all the grants that kept that place up and running. I knew that in the next minute, Brandon would make fun of my very modest salary. Which he did.

      He said, “Still paying yourself Cup-O-Noodles wages?”

      “Those days are over,” I said. “I’m working as a grant writer at a psych hospital now. It’s pays a good salary, benefits, you name it. I have a tie around my neck as we speak.” Which was true. I had put on a tie that morning.

      “I’ll be damned.” A few seconds of silence filled the line. An intentional pause. Brandon ended it with, “How’s your wife? You still married?”

      “Yep. She’s doing good. We had to put Nietzsche down, though.”

      “I’m sorry to hear that.” He paused again, for a shorter moment this time. “What does the afterlife hold for a dog that believes God is dead?”

      “Do you think Nietzsche the dog believed that?” I asked.

      Brandon said, “We better get to the point. You didn’t call me to talk about dogs and philosophers. So what is this all about? Shoot.”

      “You know a guy named Frank Walters? Works for Dickinson and Associates?”

      “Who’s asking?”

      “I’m asking.”

      “Why?”

      “I’m supposed to have lunch with him today.”

      “Ouch,” Brandon said. The pain was clearly non-physical. “Be careful.”

      “And why is that?”

      “He’s a dangerous dude.”

      “Dangerous how?”

      “He’s a guy who wants something so bad he can taste it, and he’ll tear up anything between him and it.”

      “And what does he want so badly?”

      “Oh, the same thing everyone wants: more money, more power. He works on the fifteenth floor and wants to work on the nineteenth. He lives in Agoura Hills and wants to live in Malibu. That kind of thing.”

      “Those floors and towns don’t mean anything to me,” I said. Of course, I gathered that the top brass worked on the nineteenth floor and people who wanted to be top brass were on the fifteenth. I knew what Malibu was. I’d have to look up Agoura Hills.

      “Put it this way,” Brandon said. “Walters just turned fifty. In advertising years, he’s a hundred and sixty-seven. The guy’s like Fu Manchu hatching fiendish plots to take over the company before his expiration date.”

      “What happens when you expire in advertising?”

      “You spend the rest of your life as a mid-level executive in an office with a window overlooking a parking lot and a doorway with a view of smirking shits who get promoted over you because they know how to use urban slang to sell cleaning supplies.”

      “Are you telling me my paper towels aren’t the shiznit?”

      Brandon groaned. “What does Walters want with you anyway?”

      “He says he wants to give money to the hospital.”

      “No one gives money for free. What’s Walters trying to buy with his donation?”

      “I don’t know. Maybe he’s just rich and generous.”

      “He’s neither. The fucker tips fifteen percent and he isn’t half as rich as he looks. He’s got a lot of money; don’t get me wrong. He probably made more this month than you would in a year at your stupid little hippie commune but he doesn’t have big money to give you. Not run-a-hospital money. Though I guess he does have bribe-a-grant-writer money. And he definitely has put-a-grant-writer-in-the-hospital-if-he-doesn’t-do-what-he’s-told money.”

      “Thanks for the heads up.” I took a second to process this last comment because in the world of my little desk in the maze of the Williams Building, with a window overlooking a dual diagnosis ward, advertisers who hired thugs didn’t seem to fit. I asked,