Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

"We don't know shit about 'why' things are, so we make up all kinds of stories-shrinks make up the most bizarre stories-about penises, about brain molecules. Why did Zoe come to your apartment that night?"

"She said she had to. To keep from killing herself."

"Yeah well, what you and she didn't know is, she was the Grace of God, walking into your life."

"And I was that, at first, for you?"

He looked down at his hands. "When I first met you, with Ike just having been destroyed by this place, I felt I had to try to show you what I understood. Over the year, I've watched you being crushed, turning cynical and bitter. Then, out in the woods-you and Solini show up? In here, I saw that if I could save you, I might just save myself."

"Save us?"

"Us. Yeah."

"But how? The deeper I look, the more I see I'm totally obsessed with comparing myself to others! It's hell!"

"Yeah, I know. It's a bitch, isn't it?"

"You too?"

"I'm worse than you-see? There it is."

"But you don't seem trapped by it."

"Oh, I'm great at 'seeming,' oh yeah."

I felt the "click." This was what he had wanted me to "ask" about, and what I'd shied away from, sending him walking out into the rain in disgust.

" 'Seeming' to love?"

Our eyes met. His, dark as dusk, filled with shame and flickered away. In that flickering away from me I had a sense of seeing him from close up and far off, both at once. Seeing him not only right then and there but seeing him as part of his whole life. The brilliant shy kid fleeing his family for the elephants, and from his pain at the plight of "the big fellas"

developing a talent for compassion, going on to use his strange brilliance and intensity and sense of other people to focus attention on the experience of others, drawing others to him while deflecting attention from himself, holding back, not really joining in. This whole year, he had been Malik the One Who Understands More than Me, but he had never really connected in the way in which he talked about connecting. Was he too specializing in his defect? I saw now how he'd used alcohol to break through this "seeming," it only seeming to help adding another layer of falsity.

"Buddy?" I said. "You can let me see you, it's okay."

He raised his eyes to mine. I sensed his understanding that I understood. Shame lifted and his eyes pooled with tears. I filled with an appreciation of him, of all that he had come to understand and live. And I saw all that he was about to lose, what we all would lose in losing him. Tears came. I tried to stop them but they wouldn't stop and my body shook with sobs. He and I sat there crying. As naturally as a father might comfort his child after a fall, I brought his head to my shoulder. I hugged him. Felt his bristly growth of beard.

"Fucking cancer fucking toxic shit!" he sobbed into my neck. Through the smell of vomit and night sweat and the poison of alcohol and the boniness of his shoulder and the crab of cancer snapping at the delicate pink air sacs of his lungs, through and for all this, I hugged him and he me.

After a while we sat back. He reached over and handed me a Kleenex, and took one himself. We blew our noses, two sad foghorns in the sickroom.

"Thanks," he said.

"Thank you."

"You know, all that time out in the woods drinking, all the time I've been in here, my mind is going, over and over, 'Malik, you're worse than everybody,' or 'Malik, you're better than everybody.' It's disgusting."

"I know. In my head, I've got a continuous feature playing-"The Roy G. Basch Story.' The more I try to erase it, the more it's there. How can I get rid of it?"

"What worked for me, these two years, is getting down on my knees, morning and night. Ask for help in the morning. Thank for the day's help, at night."

"You prayed?" I felt the little hairs on the back of my neck rise.

"Prayed and meditated. You know how to meditate?"

"No."

"Want me to show you?" I nodded. "This method is the Buddha's own." He sat me next to him on the bed. Told me to close my eyes. "When you look into a mirror," he said, "you see your body. When you look with your eyes closed, you see your mind. And then you've got no excuses-what you see is what you get. You see you. Focus attention on your breath. When your attention wanders, notice what it's wandered to, and bring it gently back to the breath. Don't judge it, just bring it back to the breath. Wanna do five minutes?"

"Sure." I closed my eyes. It was impossible to focus attention on my breathing for more than five seconds at a time. My mind was busy with fragmented images of trivial days. Five minutes seemed an eternity. Malik called time and asked what it had been like. I said, "What a mess."

"No joke. You think 'The Book of Basch' is bad, you should see 'The Legend of Leonard A. Malik.' "

"And this shit is going on in my mind all the time?"

"At least all the time, yop."

"What a waste, what crap! What do I do about it?"

"Do nothing!" he said, his energy rising. "Do as much nothing as possible! Just see it for what it is, just your mind. See that crap-and the anger and shame and sadness for all that crap-and sorrow for all that too-and don't lift a finger. Don't try to fix it. Sit with that sorrow, feel the edge and sharpness of that sorrow. And then-it's unbelievable! — after a while it starts to move. Sorrow can't stay still, kid, it has to move! As it moves, it starts to lose its grip on you. You get to know the pettiness and envy so well that when it bites you in your gut-'I'm not enough!'-you recognize it and you say, 'Oh there's that snake biting me in the gut,' and you remember to breathe, and you breathe, you go on. You see it as just a fact. And if we get with the facts, kid, we're free. And if we don't, the snake grows in us and sucks our spirit dry."

"Like it did to Lee White?"

"Like it did to poor fucking Ike White. What killed his spirit was always tryin' to become the Best Shrink in the World, and always feelin' like a failure for not."

We sat quietly together and the weight of this settled, the way the weight of a baby lying on your chest settles as she falls asleep.

"Malik?" It was Frankie at the door. "Patient Speaker Meetin'r

Malik looked to me. "Will you come with?"

"Sure."

"Frankie, I'm gonna bring my doctor along."

Patient Speaker Meeting was an in-house AA meeting, a kind of dry run for the outside world. The speaker was the same ugly Irish drunk who'd knocked me aside my first day on Heidelberg East Now he was clean-shaven, in a clean shirt, shaky but speaking clearly. His story was horrific. Alcoholic mother and father, first drink out hi the woods with the boys, puking his guts out, vowing never to do it again, and then, the next weekend, doing it again. As a teenager, hi order to get money for booze and time off from work to drink it, he had a friend break his arm with a baseball bat. Drunk, he didn't feel it Afraid that his arm wasn't broken, told him to hit him again. He woke up in the hospital with his arm broken in three places. To escape the law he joined the navy, where he got paid to drink full-time. Discharged, he married, had kids, and his life went to hell. One morning he went out to his car and found a child's bicycle smashed against his front fender. He had no memory of what happened The police showed up. He'd hit a little girl, broken her leg. Another morning he awoke to find his wife lying unconscious on the bed, blood all over. Again he remembered nothing. In an alcoholic blackout, he'd beaten her with a Bruins hockey stock. She took the children and left

I'd heard this story often as a doctor, and knew the ending: jail, or institutions like Misery and Candlewood, or death. My attention wandered to Jill, from whom I'd gotten another postcard: an immense radio telescope strung like a gargantuan spiderweb from peak to peak in Arecibo, Puerto Rico.