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
