Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

I let go. He walked past us out the door. I walked out after him.

He didn't go far. He was standing on the bridge over the ravine between the Heidelbergs, stamping one foot, then the other, cursing. The wrought-iron imitation gas lamps lit him up like in a film. His breath made small clouds in the mist. I saw the smallness of the clouds as a diminished pulmonary vital capacity, from his cancer.

I stood on the porch, staring at him across the stream of rain. I called to him. He waved me off. Then he took something out of his pocket that glinted in the fake gaslight. A knife? A gun? He bowed his head, struck a match. It went out. He cupped his hands more intently, struck another, and lit a cigar. He puffed, coughed, puffed again. Then he straightened up and stood there, facing me, smoking and coughing. The red tip of the cigar glowed and faded like a geriatric firefly. The shadow Malik cast seemed sharp and solid, as if a source of high wattage was blocked by something deathly opaque. Frankie came out onto the porch.

"Ever been to a meetin', Doc?" Frankie asked as we watched Malik.

"Nope."

"Shit. Biggest disease in medicine, and they don't teach you young docs how to treat it Only thing that'll save our man Malik is gettin' him to tell his story to another drunk, either his sponsor, or at a meetin'."

"He won't"

"Yeah I know. All us guys, it's like in our nature-when we get into trouble, we think we gotta 'stand tall' and handle it ourself. All that ridiculous John Wayne bullshit. For a man like Malik to ask for help is the hardest thing in the world. But the fellas who make it, well, they go against their nature. Move in the e-zact opposite direction. Ask for help. You identify with this at all?"

"Maybe. How do you get someone like Malik to ask for help?"

"Didja get him to fill out his 'Spiritual Inventory' in the chart?"

"He refused"

"Yeah, well, I guess somebody's gotta get down on his knees."

"Pray? Him?"

"Him too."

"Who else?" Frankie smiled. Horrified, I said, "Me?"

"You're the only one he's talkin' to anymore, Doc. He's choosin' you."

"Yeah, well, suppose I'm all out of God."

"Who said anythin' about God? You don't have to pray to God. You just gotta admit you ain't God, I mean you yourself."

"Who ever said I was?" My long kosher history of the Old Testament God who'd vaporize you if you dared eat a shrimp or soul-kiss a shiksa had scared me off, and I had mostly vaporized Him. "God? The face of Jesus in a plate of linguini?"

"Aw, don't do that, Doc."

"Hundreds saw Him, last week, in the linguini on a billboard in Tampa."

He laughed. From that bulky body came a girlish giggle. "Yeah, well I used to be the worst drunk in the world, Doc.

One day I asked for help-not from God, from another drunk. It worked."

"You're saying that it'll help if I pray?" "Can't hurt, can it? Malik's just about gone now." "Well how the hell is my praying gonna help him?" Malik, drenched, was coughing and shivering. "Dunno, Doc, but you got any better ideas?" I turned to go back inside. "Hey, dickhead!" Malik called out. I turned back. "Yeah?"

Malik was holding his cigar in the V of his index and middle finger, and pointing it at me accusingly. He looked like nothing so much as a failed, bitter impresario blaming me for his ruin. "What's yours?" he asked. "What the fuck is yoursT

Nineteen

THAT NIGHT I drove to the ocean, to moonlight as an emergency room doctor at Collins Community Hospital, which served a once-flourishing fishing port now decaying hopefully to a tourist trap. Solini had been moonlighting mere. This was my first time. It was eighty bucks an hour for a twelve-hour shift, from seven at night to seven in the morning, and much of it, according to Henry, would be spent sleeping. I had dug up my battered black bag and instruments that I'd used on our trip around the world, serving as a doctor when needed. The last time had been just about a year before in Changsha, China, after the flooding of the Xiangjiang River.

Now as I drove on through the dark rain-rain that I knew would assure me a busy night-Malik's words echoed in my mind, much as, when a coin spinning on a tabletop falters, the ringing gets more and more insistent as it falls.

"What's yours! What's your pain, your secret, your obsession?"

He was saying that the only way I could be with him was to be with my own pain. Yet something was keeping me from it, even from my telling anyone about my own despair, my having prepared to commit suicide. What had he meant when he'd said, 'Too late to ask"? Ask what?

Collins Hospital was a classic New England colonial complex overlooking the sea. I walked through the packed waiting room like a gunslinger hired to save the town. Greeting the nurses and orderlies, I eased into the familiar banter of those chosen to work the frayed edge between health and horror. I soon felt at home.

Immediately I was bombed, starting with a kid with an earache and a temp of 105, a man my age dying from a heart

attack, two ferocious nosebleeds, a garbageman who'd fallen down a manhole, a kid with a popcorn kernel in her ear which I couldn't get out, a horrifically sick old man from a nursing home who thought I was "Lana Tuna," and several minor car accidents, one after a high-speed police chase that had half the local cops signing in with neck and back pain, going for the gold of workmen's comp. Most I handled with ease, pleased that my body-doctoring skills were still intact.

And there was also something new, for as I worked on these people I realized how much my vision had broadened. Instead of seeing just bodies, I was seeing people, reading people, sensing in people's faces and postures and words and in the intangible stuff, some truth about the person, not only in terms of each life, but in each as part of any life, of life itself. I saw the sorrow behind the smile, the years of pain pulling out the lines from the corners of the mouth and eyes, the rage provoking the scar, the weight of nostalgia tugging down the lip, even the smile behind the sorrow. From my year of focusing on the something else besides what these people were showing me consciously, they had become more translucent yet more substantial, in the way that the translucency of a deep-sea creature reveals the bones, the guts, the feathery beat of the heart, that glassy-ribbed heart.

My way of being with them as a doctor had changed. My instruments-my shiny chrome stethoscope, otoscope, ophthalmoscope, reflex hammer-were not so much instruments to probe the body as tools with which to make contact. Examining a feverish, scared infant making the classic bark of croup, I gave her the bell end of the stethoscope to play with, and let her put it on my own chest before putting it on hers, so that it became for her-and for me, through her laughter-a way of easing her fear. Once I had the feel with a person, he or she caught on, and seemed more interesting. For the first time in my medical career, something bizarre was happening: I, a doctor, was truly curious about them, the patients. How reassuring it was, after so many hands-off months of shrinking, to noodle around in bodies, palpating a belly, percussing a spleen, auscultating a heart, the sounds calling up the anatomy-that squeak a tight aortic valve, that train rumble a leaky mitral. And the beauty of the retina, the only place in the body where blood vessels can be seen directly, a bright red

tangle of arterioles against the amber dome, the Sistine of sight.

Not that it was easy. Medicine reflects society, and the society of this dying town was split between the few who owned everything, the Reagan-Bush-Clinton rich, and the anxious rest. The town was full of violence and greed and drugs and people losing jobs and losing hope, all under the mocking eye of the few who, in our tattered democracy because they could pay to control the tax code and the politicians, controlled the many, the few who holed up behind the alarmed granite walls and ironwork gates of their great estates, with private security and private schools and private jets and private clubs and private souls. I was the guy at the end of the ambulance ride, treating the rage and despair.