Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

Suddenly I felt cold. Somewhere in this sanctuary Cherokee Putnam had put a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

Realizing then that that was why I had been drawn here, I stood chilled by the wind and warmed by the sun, trying to get my mind around these images. That was what had killed Cherokee: his relentless comparing himself to others and feeling he was not enough, a failure, trapped. A core ingrati, he'd called it, an "ungrateful heart."

"The hearts of ambitious people dry up," Malik had said. "The self is insatiable-it can never get enough. Once you get

into your self, kid, you can't help but compare yourself to others, and you're doomed."

Now I saw what he meant. Hadn't I done a good job in the emergency room because nothing about me was riding on it? No one knew me there, nothing I did would advance or retard my career. I was not into me, I was into caring for others. I had relaxed into just doing the job at hand, meeting each challenge without pride, doing things easily, with that relaxation into the truth in the corner of my eye. The meeting of the challenge had created the energy, increased the understanding. Not being focused on myself had opened up my vision, allowed me to read people. I knew all too well the destruction I caused when I went ruthlessly after things with tunnel vision, knocking others aside to get there. My focus on my failures on this beach on that dazzling day had kept me from being with the woman I loved. When I saw the world in terms of myself, I saw narrowly and perversely, I compared myself to others, felt I was never enough, and my obsession with all the others who were enough passed in front of my eyes like the electronic stock quote strip that runs around the front of that tower in Times Square.

But if I saw the world not in terms of me, but as a world of which I am a part, a temporary expression? What might I see?

Suddenly I understood how "self " was at the center of psychiatry, a whole industry sprung up to use the self of the psychiatrist to solidify the self of the patient, using talk, using drugs-it was all the same. The various theories were an invention of complexity in the face of something that was incredibly simple: making connection. As if they had invented the complexity not only to protect themselves from that connection, but also to make their own "selves" seem special, better than or smarter than-any comparative would do- their patients? All these suits of armor and regimented ties, these big black shoes, these laughable words. Make it so complex that you need advanced degrees to do it, and only they could do it, charging enormous prices for their monopoly on the perversion of "selfdom," the suicidal white underbelly of the American Dream, to fight tooth and nail not to be with others, or to be like others, but to be special, separated and individuated from others. What bullshit. And all the while it is connection, not self, that heals.

But how? How to get the self out of the way and just be there?

"Ask."

I stared directly into the sun as it eased aside the coverlets of mist, and saw what Malik had meant. In that moment with him, feeling pressured by nun to respond, I thought I should be able to fix it, and not being able to think how to fix it, had said nothing. All I had to do was ask. My self-centeredness had kept me from asking. If I let go of the center, could the right questions be asked? Asked of him? Asked from him, for help? Are they the same?

"What's yours?

Could it be just this, my obsession with comparison?

The way that I, from my earliest memories, had tried to be better than everyone, at grade school, at sports, with girls, in college-organic chemistry! — Oxford, med school, my trying to be better keeping me from connecting, keeping me from helping anyone else-great preparation for the "helping professions!" — the tape of comparing myself to others running in my head, keeping me from having the clarity of heart to take the hand offered by the woman who loved me for myself and in spite of myself too, whom I could mostly hide the tape from, keeping me from being with her at the deepest levels, let alone nurturing others, except for my own success. Always comparing, and at the moments of my greatest success, feeling like I was a great failure. Now I saw how this whole year I'd been comparing myself to my teachers, how, when I was with my patients, I was focusing on trying to be as terrific a shrink as Heiler, or A.K., or Ike, or even Malik, rather than just forgetting myself and being there with them. A.K. was the worst, the real point of her Freudianism being to focus on your own inner machinery, and this focus had first seduced, then isolated, and finally killed Cherokee. With disgust I saw how I had been intent on playing a boy's game of "Follow the Leader," and all the while the people asking me for help were dropping alongside. I was walking along behind the alleged authorities, and all the while chanting under my breath the great American mantra, "not enough, not enough, I am not enough."

And keeping it a secret, even from myself. Hiding it, yes. All the secrets we men keep, the double lives we men live.

From the secret pain of Ike White smiling and shaking my hand an hour before he did it, to Cherokee, who never once mentioned his obsession with suicide to me, and all the patients I'd heard it from, like the man who for years seemed to be going out to work each morning but in fact went to shack up with a woman and drink and watch TV till the wife's money ran out, and the cousin's husband whose long affair with the fellow schoolteacher was discovered only when he left the pornographic photos of them on his workbench in the basement in a box filled with forms he'd been given to fill out by students for college recommendations, all of which were still blank. All these double lives, these secrets! All the ways we men stay unseen. My secrets. I'd never really opened up to Malik about my work with Cherokee. I still hadn't told him about my seeing Schlomo fucking Zoe. And I'd yet to tell anyone about my plans to kill myself.

"What the fuck is yours?

"I'm obsessed with comparing myself to others," I said to a nearby gull.

Is it possible? I wondered, staring at the gull and then past it to the sun, seeing it straggle up out of the week of rain and morning's rain like a wet mirage, shaped through the layers of mist to look remarkably like a gilded version of my grandfather's battered homburg hat. Is this "mine"?

"Hey, it's possible," I whispered to the sun, feeling embarrassed at this, such a thin, reedy voice at the billowing intersect of ocean and beach and windy sky, this magnificent edge of dawn's bed. I felt really tired, tired of the old ways of seeing the world, and yet I felt like the sun, my heart rising through the mist, freed.

I wanted desperately to do something, to make some sign. I got down on my knees and put my palms to the sand and, that not being enough-there it is again, that "enough" shit! — I lay flat on my belly, putting my face to the sand, it feeling rough, gritty, bathing my eyelids my nose my lips in a mist of grit. Wondering, Is this prayer I hope not, I rubbed my face back and forth in this grit, and then I gathered myself and sprang up into the air like one of the worst psychotics in the world and cried out, "It is possible!" and continued to cry it out as I half ran half floated up the beach, back, feeling for the first time in my life that I was more like everyone than not.

The buffoonish gulls and meticulous sandpipers scattered, then re-formed like water in my wake. How could I have helped Cherokee? How can I help Malik?

By riding this sense of "like," by connecting. But how? Something is missing. Whom to ask now, for help?

MALIK REFUSED TO see me.

At three that afternoon I drove to the nursery school. Berry would be out at three-fifteen. I hadn't seen her for a long time, and although we'd talked on the phone maybe once every other week or so, we had stayed away from the pain, and the residual hope.