Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

"Since when does a drunk have a choice?" Frankie asked

" 'Self-centered thought and action,' " Geneva said, "is a killer."

"Screw you," Malik said bitterly, "screw you all. I'm going back to bed."

That was just the beginning. Malik attacked all of us, especially me, his alleged therapist Anything I said or tried to suggest, or do, or not do-even the quality of my listening-he

either trashed directly or mocked perfectly. He took everything I said and batted it back to me, using his uncanny feel for the inner workings of people on me, criticizing me mercilessly. I knew that he was in withdrawal and a little looped on Librium, but still, all his negativism about me and life was hard to take. I felt incompetent and naive, much like I'd felt on my first days on Emerson, faced with a hallful of "borderlines" that Malik said didn't exist. He was infuriating, baffling. Every day when I went to see him, I was called on to use all the skills he had taught me, and all the skills I had learned over the year-how to face someone's rage, how to work the transference, how to keep exploring-trying to just be there with him despite his fatalism, bitterness, and rage.

It wasn't just his negativism that made things hard, it was the sheer force of his presence. For the first time I could see how I, and other psychiatrists, in the presence of someone full of energy, full of the fatal real stuff of living, could take the easy way out, retreat, protect, defend by calling in umpteen Heiler factors, or A.K.'s Freudian bullshit reducing vitality to bad childhoods, or Errol's biology saying it's all bad brain molecules and we can fix it fast because people are basically dogs. Like when the eye doctor clicks in those last few lenses and suddenly you not only see, but see that you have not been seeing, I saw the power of psychiatry to fashion hundreds of ways to deny the truth of human-to-human contact and label the other person as "sick." But if there was one thing I was sure of about Malik, it was that he was not "sick." Mentally, he was one of the healthiest people I'd ever met.

I was not at all sure that I could meet him in his intensity. Often, being with him felt too hot to take. Or too cold, for sometimes he would withdraw under the covers, alone, all ice. I constantly felt like a failure, believing that after eight days he'd walk and start to drink, and it would be my fault. We extended our sessions to an hour and a half. The level of real-ness he demanded was extraordinary. Any wavering, any bullshit, any movement away from this "ruthless encounter" in the present, and he picked it up and threw it back in my face. Sometimes there would come a point where it was like listening to fingernails screeching against a blackboard. Other times the silence was so intense I sensed it was the big one: a beloved person, dying.

I was sitting with an expert who had handed over all expertise to me, while demanding that I not treat him "expertly," but merely as another suffering human being. How was I supposed to use my own experience of suffering to help him, anyhow? I felt lost. On rare occasions I would try to slip in one of the techniques he himself had taught me.

"Don't try that goody-two-shoes Malik bullshit on me" he'd say. "Let's just forget it. The only thing that can help me is talking to another drunk."

"I may be a drunk too."

"You? You're not a drunk."

"I've been drinking a lot." I told him about fleeing Misery for a drink or two before facing Zoe in therapy.

"A drink or two?"

"Yeah."

"A drunk would never stop at two. You ain't one."

"So then how can I help you? You need to go to the AA groups, and talk."

"Yeah, but I can't. The staff all know me. I'm too ashamed." I stared at him as if from a distance. "And stop looking at me like I'm already dead. I'm not an object, I'm a person. I'm still here. Jesus fuckin' Christ!"

EPIDEMIC, UNAPOLOGETIC RAIN dimmed the days and pestered the nights. On day three, Malik refused to get out of bed. He was filled with gloom.

"I've never been able to really love anyone, my whole fucking life."

"You?" I said. He didn't respond. "What do you mean?"

"Aw c'mon!" he said, and then, mockingly, " 'What do you meeen?'"

"People think you love them."

"Great, great. It's nice to think that they think that, oh yeah."

"You draw people to you. It's unbelievable how many people have come to visit you in here."

It was true. Malik was like a beloved patriarch on his deathbed in the autumn of his life. Not only was he visited by Bronia and her friends, but by great numbers of Misery workers, from Viv, who came in with a florid dress and a perfume that whacked you hard and a lace hankie, and Primo,

who blubbered like a baby, through various Misery social workers and nurses and mental health workers, to just about every member of Buildings and Grounds who chattered awkwardly with him in their particular dialects from Africa or the Caribbean and left a small token of their love, usually a single flower or a bead or, from one ebony-black woman whose neck seemed more constrained than adorned by gold bangles, a doll and pins and in a glassine bag a potion from the Brazilian rain forest containing a piece of skin from the giant anaconda that ate her brother which she said he should smoke to "kill dot Cancer Debil." Then there were those from the AA and NA community, the "Program" people, people from all walks of life, "from Yale to jail," from all over New England, for it turned out that Malik had been active in going on "commitments," where one AA group went to talk to another.

Soon Geneva and I, with his agreement, had to restrict his visitors. Word spread fast, and the torrent of visitors eased to a trickle and then to nothing at all, except one day when an older woman appeared who looked familiar. She turned out to be Mrs. Kondrath-Robb, the nurse on Women's Chronic 9 at Candlewood, the back ward that Malik and I had been the only doctors to venture into. Malik had kept going back weekly. I had not. Another failure.

Now I said to him, "Everybody loves you, Malik."

"Yeah," he said, sinking lower into his pillow, "but I don't love anybody the way I could. I look good, but I'm faking it I lead a double life, a secret life. I can't love anyone. Can't really get to it with anyone." He paused, shot me a furtive, shy look. "Like I'm not gettin' to it with you."

He turned his head and stared at me, waiting for my answer. I felt a pressure to respond, to try to help, to fix things. But I didn't know what to say or do. Worse, I saw that he knew I didn't. I felt flustered.

"Can't you say anything"} For Chrissakes I just spill my guts to you, Basch, tell you the worst thing about me, and you just sit therel Fuck! Stop thinking about your fuckin' self and start thinkin' about me\"

"I am thinking about you-"

"The hell you are."

"You're a lot better at this than me, Malik. I'm trying my best, but-"

"I'm lost, I'm hurting, I need to feel you with me! You're my best friend and I don't know you!"

"Me?"

"What's your pain? Your secret, the double life you're leading? What's your suffering, your obsession? What's yoursT

"I… I don't know."

"Terrific, Basch, you're history. I'm outta here." He got up and walked out into the hallway, heading for the unlocked door.

Frankie the mental health worker stopped him. "Easy does it, Malik."

"I'm dying," he said bitterly, "I might as well die drunk."

"Malik, please," I said, "I'm sorry-"

'Too late, Basch. When it came right down to it-" He coughed, pitiably. "-you couldn't even ask."

"Ask?"

"Figure it out."

"Stop." I grabbed his arm. "You will not leave. No way."

"Oh that's good," he said mockingly. "Use your authority. Use force. Get violent. That's very good, that's really going to work, on me."