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 clothes. I was aware all the while of Thoreau’s warning to beware of the enterprise that requires new clothes. I was also aware that Thoreau’s mother baked him cookies while he was living out on Walden Pond. And Ralph Waldo Emerson—or Thoreau’s aunt or mom, depending on where you get your story—paid Thoreau’s taxes when he was in jail for not paying them. Since I had no one but myself to bake me cookies and pay my taxes, I couldn’t be too wary of this enterprise. Since I didn’t want to walk around for weeks smelling like a discount department store or from the body odor of days gone by, I gathered my new clothes and old clothes, and walked down to the laundromat.
This was a particularly tough day because it was the day my dog was going to die. My dog lived with my wife back in Fresno. I wanted to be there. For her. For him. I wanted to see him one last time and hold my wife when she cried but I couldn’t find a bus or train or any other conveyance making its way from where I lived on the Southern California coast out to inland Fresno. So, on my dog’s last day, I walked down the hill from my apartment to the nearest laundromat. I stacked my clothes on empty washers, slid dollars into a machine that gave me quarters, and slid those quarters into washers that filled with water. I filled them with detergent and clothes and the laundry bag that held the clothes. When the washers were loaded, I sat on a white plastic chair between the laundromat’s front door and its side door. Santa Ana winds blew in one door and out the other. I leaned back, opened a book, stared at the words, and thought about my dog and my wife.
The dog’s name was Nietzsche. He was so old that he dated back to a time in our shared life when my wife and I were too young and stupid to realize how pretentious it was to name your dog after a philosopher, much less a German one with five consecutive consonants in his last name. That would put our adoption of Nietzsche at the summer between our freshman and sophomore years at Fresno State. If you count the years backwards from the time of this story to that particular shared summer, and then apply those years to Nietzsche’s life, you’d realize that he was nearly eighteen years old. He had a permanent scab on his back just north of his tail. His hair matted up as it dried from his bath. He could not see. He could not hear. He was able to digest less than half the food he ate. The rest of the food came out as vomit or diarrhea. Since his hip was pretty much shot and he couldn’t walk too well, he generally lay around within a few feet of this vomit or diarrhea. He smelled like death. It was time.
The only thing keeping the poor Nietzsche alive was my wife’s love and her patience with the necessity of cleaning up his vomit and diarrhea daily. I had loved Nietzsche, too. I saw him as a portal into greater things in my life when we first adopted him. As his health deteriorated,