“Exactly.”
“But wouldn’t there be obvious problems? Like, how do you know that the dog isn’t reacting to the sound of the camera turning on?”
“That’s what the packing foam is all about. To muffle the sound.”
“Dogs hear pretty well.”
“There is an element of classical conditioning,” Eric said. “To get around that, Dr. Bishop has me set the time to click on a few hours before you typically get home. Mostly we want to see if the dogs react.”
Clint Dempsey reacted. He dropped the tennis ball between Eric’s legs. Eric tossed the ball downhill. Clint Dempsey pursued.
I took this little break to come to a quick conclusion. I analyzed the comfort with which he used the term “classical conditioning.” I chewed on his use of the second person plural pronoun. We. As in “we want to see.” Not that Dr. Bishop wanted to see. Eric wanted to see, too. He must’ve had some kind of stake in this research. So I tested him. “Does this have anything do with the collective unconscious?”
“Yep. That’s exactly it,” Eric said. The orange light of the sunset settled into the crevices on his face. He stared off toward the Pacific. He didn’t say more. It seemed like he’d given me my first clue but I wasn’t sure what to do with it.
6
On the Wednesday before my Thursday lunch with Frank “Castor Oil” Walters, I dined alone on a picnic bench on psych hospital grounds. A cool Pacific wind sifted through the thin fabric of my discount department store clothes, but the warm sun countered the wind. It created a nice balance. About twenty yards to my left, a group of patients engaged in a pseudo-game of croquet. Psych techs kept a close eye on the game. One doctor patiently explained the rules, showed the patients the proper way to swing the mallet, and showed them the non-threatening way to hold the mallet between their turns. The patients were not high functioning. They wandered away from the course. Psych techs wrangled them back.
To my right, squirrels darted in and about a knotty manzanita tree. They barked and ran. I ate my sandwich. Salami and provolone on rye bread. A little bit of mustard. One squirrel had an acorn in his mouth. He seemed to lead the pack. The other squirrels chased him. I wondered what was behind it all. What thoughts ran through the tiny brains of these squirrels? Did they want to steal the acorn from their neighbor? With so many oak trees on the premises, so many acorns on the ground and in the trees, why take the time to steal this one? Why not just go snag an easily accessible acorn? Or maybe this was a game, like rugby or something. Catch the Squirrel with the Acorn. Maybe they had elaborate rules for Catch the Squirrel with the Acorn. Maybe goals could be scored, winners declared. Maybe they had practices and tournaments, acorn-holding champions and retired acorn-holding stars who thought wistfully about the glory days of running with their acorns, never getting caught. And, if so, there must be defensive stars as well: burly squirrels who knew the proper angle of pursuit to capture that acorn with the least amount of effort, fearless squirrels willing to forgo their own safety to launch out of acorn-filled trees in pursuit of the acorn runner. Or perhaps this was no game at all, but an elaborate mating ritual. Perhaps, in the squirrel kingdom, the male squirrel demonstrates his value by carrying the acorn; the female shows her love in the pursuit. Perhaps this one squirrel winding around the knotty branches of the manzanita tree was actually a lucky dude. Two females in pursuit. He’d let one catch him.
No, I didn’t want to think about that. Personifying squirrels as jocks was all easy enough. A harmless daydream. Personifying love in squirrels, though, brought me to that sensitive area of my mind that I was trying to dodge. In fact, the mental activities of my lunch all had to do with an elaborate game of repression and evasion. I didn’t want to think about Dr. Bishop’s camera in my foyer or the experiment behind it; I didn’t want to think about my meeting with Frank “Castor Oil” Walters; I didn’t want to think about The Professor or my existence or how much of it might be my imagination protecting me from madness. And I definitely didn’t want to think about Lola Diaz, whom I hadn’t seen since my first day at the psych hospital.
Lola had spent a good deal of time lately wandering through the alleys and passageways of my mind. Old memories were dragged to the surface of my consciousness. Lola unearthed thoughts and feelings long ago discarded. When this happened, I sought solace in The Professor’s philosophy. I tried to convince myself that maybe it was all a fiction. Maybe there was no Lola Diaz. Maybe I’d just created all the thoughts and feelings and memories as a way to ward off the madness inherent in a fleeting, meaningless existence. Maybe…
“Is it really you?”
I’d been so lost in thought that I hadn’t heard her walk up. It was almost as if she glided in on the wind of my thoughts. I turned to look, though I already knew.
I said, “Hey, Lola.”
She sat next to me in a blur of past and present. She’d spent the last twenty years frozen in the amber of my memory, forever sixteen years old. Now I had to update her in my mind. Some things hadn’t changed: that cute little nose, her plump lips, her irises the soft brown of Sugar Babies. She still didn’t wear make-up. In general, everything about her had gotten a little bit bigger. Her cheeks were a little rounder; her breasts took a wider curve. With her low-cut polyester shirt showing me so much of those particular curves—the olive skin going pale in the sunlight—I had to make sure that my line of vision shot up to less invasive regions. Her brown hair still hung ironed straight with that precise part right down the middle. At first, I thought she’d dyed highlighted streaks in it. Looking closer, though, there was no hair dye. Gray hairs had infiltrated in too great a number to pluck but not with enough force to take over. So this was Lola Diaz at thirty-seven. I had no idea she’d be so beautiful.
Lola smiled. “It is you,” she said. “I thought I’d seen you around. What are you doing here?”
I held up the remaining half of my salami and provolone sandwich. “Just having lunch.”
“I meant here.” Lola pointed down at the table. “You know. Here.”
“You mean in the psych hospital?”
“Exactly.”
“I work here. I’m a grant writer.”
“I see.” Lola nodded. I wondered if that was a look of disappointment on her face. Was she let down by my employee status? Had she hoped for me to say, “I’m a patient,” and share my tale of woe? She stared down at the table. I tried to figure out what she was looking at. Nothing lay in front of her but rough planks of wood and flaking paint. I thought to ask her what she was here for but I couldn’t bring myself to. She deserved her privacy.
I started to lift my left hand to scratch my cheek. Halfway to my face, Lola reached out and grabbed the gold band on my left ring finger. She touched it with her thumb and middle finger in a way that kept her skin from touching my skin. Still, I felt like I could feel her skin so close to mine, like the static electricity of her fingers were making the small hairs on my hand rise. Lola let go of my wedding ring. She said, “Pack up your lunch. I want to show you something.”
When I think of the stories that my mind has created to explain how I got here, I remember things this way: Lola and I had gone to high school together. That was in Folsom. There wasn’t much to Folsom when we lived there. Not much to make it different from any other farming town in that middle California agricultural belt. We had a prison that Johnny Cash made famous in a song. We had a lot of hills and rocky pastures that made for good dirt bike paths. That’s about all I remember. And I don’t even remember the prison so much as I know the Johnny Cash song. I’ve heard that Folsom became more suburban since absorbing the Sacramento overflow, nurturing outlet malls and chain restaurants and big box stores. I can’t say for sure. My parents moved away from Folsom when I was in college. I haven’t been back since.
Swimming in that shallow pool of