Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

"Yeah, sure. You doctors are all alike."

As I put together his chart, I had a sense that something was terribly wrong: I would be Malik's doctor? How could I make the shift from seeing him as my teacher to seeing him as my patient, and in a mental hospital that he had taught me was dangerous to your mental health? I stared down the hallway at the little group: Malik was sitting between George and Frankie, his head in his hands, his whole body shaking. From a chill? Fear? Could he be weeping? Solini was in motion before them, rolling and dancing, wiping his eyes as if crying. Something about the four of them, sitting there together in the dark lap of grief in a corner of that brightly lit hallway, helped me to move.

I stood in front of Malik and said, "I'll have to admit you."

"Shhh," he said, holding his head as if I'd shouted at him. "Whisper, 'kay?" I nodded. He paused. "I ain't sure I'm gonna stay."

"Malik," George said, "you are gonna stay. Right, Frankie?"

"Right. Turn it over, Malik. Right?"

Malik grunted something that did not sound like agreement.

"Where do you want him, Doc?" George asked.

"There's no need to do a formal interview," I said, "just bring him-"

"You gonna be my doctor?" Malik said savagely. "Or you gonna fuck around? 'Cause if you're gonna fuck around I'm outta here."

"Okay, let's go. Bring him into the examining room,"

They hoisted him up. He stopped them. "Listen, all of you." He coughed pitifully. Solini blew his nose wetly. "I'm scared. My life is shit. I have no idea how to deal with this. I'm asking for help. From all of you." He looked from one of us to the other, his eyes, coming to me, seeming dull, low wattage, as if he'd been unplugged. "Forget I'm a doctor. Treat me as if I were someone you really cared about-a family member, or a good friend."

"You are," I said.

"Yeah, man," Solini said.

"A good friend in shit shape. I'm turning my life over to you."

Alone with him in the examining room, I sat for a few seconds, trying to adjust my "set" to being here with a new patient, but a patient whom I really cared about. Distance and

closeness flickered back and forth, like one of those drawings that seen one way is an urn, seen another, two faces. I asked, "What happened?"

In a quiet voice riding on bitterness, punctured by dry coughs that seemed to tear at my own chest, he talked about his desperation on Thoreau, trying to care for people who were being destroyed by A.K., his desperation at seeing me being destroyed, the guilt he felt for not being able to protect Oly Joe or Zoe, his starting to withdraw from Bronia. "And from AA. Remember the night you saw me leave my meetin' early? I was 'budding.' "

;' 'Budding'?"

"Getting ready to drink. You missed it"

"Missed what?"

' "The Malik Sign.' Talking to you that night, when you offered me tea, I thought of drinking, and I licked my lips. A drunk who's gettin' ready to drink will always lick his lips the first time in a conversation he thinks of alcohol-an addict too, with his drug of choice. I got isolated. Didn't call my sponsor. Bronia went to Israel-again! Finally I went to see my doctor, got some tests. Coin-sized lesion, left lower lobe. Fingerprint of death. Had a long talk with my doc, going over alternatives. Then I went out"

" 'Out'?"

"Drinkin'. Took Bronia's tent and headed for the woods."

"What about the cancer? What'd they say?"

"C'mon," Malik said angrily, "c'mon! Stay with me where I am. I'm telling you I was trying to destroy myself, going into the woods!"

"But I thought that was why you 'went out,' and-"

"There's no 'why'! I drink 'cause I got a disease."

"You really believe that?"

"This isn't about what I believe or what you thought, this is about life 'n' death. Can you get with me or not? 'Cause if you can't, if you can't stand it, / can't stand it, and I'm gone. I'm such a smart tough miserable sonofabitch that anything less than reality is gonna fail! Let go of the shrink bullshit and just reach! Be with me! Yes or no?"

"Yes," I said, holding out my hand, palm up, to nun.

He stared at it, and then put his own on it, his hand filthy and raw against the clean pink of mine, dirt making black

rings under every nail but one that was purple, half torn off, his hand trembling from the few hours without alcohol in it, his skin dry from dehydration, the tremor stirring up a sickly sweet scent of ketone and a flashback to the derelict drunks of my internship. I squeezed his hand, the watery thinness of it a shadow of our first handshake on Emerson last July, when the tendons had felt like wires and the muscles like pliant steel- an athlete's hand.

"Maybe you are," he said, taking his hand away, "and maybe not."

He went on to talk about his pattern of drinking before I met him, and of his drinking during his residency. Two years before exactly, when his Heiler patient had hanged herself after a session with him, he'd gotten sober.

"My second anniversary was hell," he said. "We drunks, deep down, have such a shitty opinion of ourselves, that all the good things that happen when we're sober don't seem to fit, so we sabotage 'em."

We finished the interview. I helped him strip for the physical exam. His dirt-dark head and hands and ankles contrasted with the white skin of the rest of him, like a blackface minstrel offstage. As I went over him, I saw the slippage in tone and tissue of his athlete's body, and felt sad.

"I refuse the rectal," he said. "Find anything? Like liver?"

"Nope," I said, knowing he was wondering if I had palpated a hard liver edge, a sign that the cancer had metastasized already. "Except for some infected sores and dehydration, physical exam normal." Our eyes met again. He shook his head, at the irony of the "normal."

"Cancer, me?" he said, shaking his head. "People always seem to get what they fear most."

"I'll draw bloods and write the order for a Librium detox. We'll get you cleaned up and to bed."

Getting the tubes and needles and putting on the tourniquet and drawing his blood was a relief. "You're not so bad at straight medicine," Malik said sarcastically. "Y'ever think of becoming a real doctor?" I smiled. "I know I need to go to groups here, see my sponsor, work the Program, but deep down all I feel is 'fuck it.' I need you, Basch, to help me stay here, get my ass in gear."

"I'll drop by as much as I can."

"Dickheads never learn. You don't 'drop by,' you make appointments with. I'm in hell. I need some order."

I got out my book and made appointments for each day. "Okay, let's go."

"I can't go."

"Why not?"

"Because I'm stark naked, schmucko, and I've got no clean clothes!"

"Sorry. I'll get you something to wear."

"Amazing," he said quietly. "You didn't even ask."

"Ask what?'

"Why I got cancer. We've gotten so used to everybody getting cancer, that when somebody gets it, we don't even ask why. We see it as an act of God, which is the one thing it most certainly is not. Uh oh." He rolled his eyes.

Bronia was in the doorway, carrying a suitcase. She marched past me straight to Malik, and from her stride I was afraid she would smack him for insubordination, but she put her hands on him gently and broke into sobs. I left them there together while I went to write his orders.

THE NEXT MORNING Malik announced that he was leaving.

"Nice try, Basch, but no thanks."

He made it out of his room into the foyer before he encountered Frankie, the mental health worker. Frankie, broad and solid, blocked his way. Geneva and Yoman were there. Seeing Malik, the dog whined and waggled expectantly.

"Hello, Leonard," Geneva said. "Going to 'Leisure Skills Group'?"

Malik stood mere for a few seconds, swaying. "I didn't come in here of my own free will. I was carried in. It wasn't my choke."