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 the lot of them.
One young white guy in a FUBU sweatshirt held my glance so long that I felt like I had to say something. “Hi.”
He replied, “’Sup,” and kept looking.
I took this as an invitation to cross the line past what was likely appropriate, considering my probationary status as an employee and my perhaps shaky status as a husband now that my wife was balking on making the few-hundred-mile move to Southern California. I said to him, “Lola’s not taking her smoke break, huh?”
“Who?”
“Lola Diaz?”
“She a nurse or something?”
“A patient.”
The dude shook his head. “Ain’t no beaners in this dorm.”
I winced, either at the word “beaner” or at the usually repressed notion that something about me in my white skin and discount department store clothes suggested that I was an okay guy to say “beaner” around. I thought about making a comment about his comment and taking this conversation to the next level. I stopped myself when I realized that this dude was a patient at a mental hospital. “A patient,” I told myself. “In a mental hospital.” Besides that, he was a white guy in a FUBU shirt. I let it all slide, cut through the dual diagnosis dorm, and headed for the Williams Building.
Originally, the Williams Building had been built on the bottom of a hill. Small white Doric columns framed the entranceway. The building stretched three stories above the classical entranceway, its ancient brick bleached by the California sun, reinforced by rusty sand filling in porous gaps, and worn smooth by Pacific winds. The original building carried an addition the way a horseshoe crab carries its young. The addition stretched halfway up the hill, supported by newer brick, flanked by newer windows, topped by a black shingle roof that was sloped slightly steeper than the original. Sunlight bounced off the ghost of a long-forgotten contractor who surely must have put an arm around a cost-conscious university president saying, “We can save you thousands of dollars this way and who’s gonna know the difference? You and me. That’s it.” And perhaps a younger ghost of that older university president was looking at the finished addition, thinking, No. Everyone will notice. All in all, the building didn’t look too bad. Another twenty years of sun and dirt and wind might even the score.
The toughest thing about the addition came from the building’s inside layout. The Williams Building was four stories high but it had eight different levels. Nine, if you counted the basement. The first floor of the original building was roughly six feet lower than the first floor of the newer building. All of the ceilings were about twelve feet high. The hallways from the newer building didn’t exactly match up with the older hallways. Shrinking faculty offices, wide open halls for lectures, subdivided rooms for graduate assistants, and reroutes through the old classrooms that had been cut into newer, smaller ones added to the overall maze of the guts of the Williams Building. Six-foot stairways would surprise me. Halls would lead to dark recesses yet to be remodeled for the building’s new job in the psych hospital. Simple errands during my first week caused me to pause and reflect on who might own a complete blueprint of this building and whether he’d sell me that blueprint. At times, I dreamed of drawing the Williams Building treasure map and placing a giant red X on my office. I toyed with the idea of bringing string to work, letting it unravel from the front door to my office. Breadcrumbs seemed too unreliable. My office was on the third and a half floor.
I wound my way through the Williams labyrinth, counting my steps. Twelve paces to the right to reach the stairway, up four levels of stairs, then to the left. I fumed about that cracked inner tube of a kid calling the second girl I’d ever loved a “beaner.” I cut through the interns’ lounge and counted seven more steps to the left. I tried to remind myself that I have to give people more leeway in a psych hospital. That argument didn’t work. I still fumed. I successfully reminded myself that those last seven steps to the left were always a mistake and turned around, repairing those seven mistaken steps and adding an additional thirteen to them before reaching another half-stairway that led me to the familiar right turn into what on Sundays was apparently a dark hallway. For whatever reason, this reminded me of Nietzsche again. The dog, not the philosopher. I closed my eyes and counted my last steps thinking about the now-departed pup. At the count of eight, I opened my eyes again, turned to the right, and opened my office door.
The Professor sat there. He faced my desk, back to the door. He did not turn to look at me as I entered the office. I walked around my desk, sat in my chair, and faced him. “Professor,” I said, and smiled.
This is a problem of mine: I smile when I don’t know which emotion to express. I’ve been doing it at least since I was a little
