Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

I felt confused and overwhelmed. Everything this fanatic was telling me was the opposite of what I'd been taught about psychiatry before.

"Here, sit," Malik said. "Listen up." I sat on the lush, close-cropped grass, staring at Malik's tank top, on which two lambs were holding hands over their heads in triumph, and the acronym LAMBS. "This is a BPO ward. But check out the diagnoses: BPO with A-Anorexia; BPO with B-Bulimia; BPO with C–Catalonia; BPO with D-Depression; BPO with M-Mushrooms."

"Mushrooms?"

"Just checking. So Blair Heiler keeps trying to fit people into BPO, but they won't fit. So he keeps adding letters. One of these days he'll admit an adolescent with BPO with Z- Zits!"

"Why does Heiler try to fit people into diagnoses?"

"Money and fame. He's a protege of Lloyal von Nott, world expert in money. He gets Lloyal to give him a ward for BPO. He gets drug money to study the Krotkey Factors to diagnose BPO. He finds that BPOs fit the factors! Quite a coincidence, eh? He gets more patients, with more BPO. Becomes world expert in BPO. Fame, money, climbing the greasy pole of aca-demia. Heiler's in a catfight with his rivals at McLean Hospital to corner the market on BPO, Meanwhile he terrorizes these patients-which makes 'em act like BPOs! He publishes, they perish. Lotta suicides on his ward. Which is another Krotkey Factor: BPO with SS-Successful Suicide. And BPOs don't even exist. They're just people, right? We coulda got any diagnosis we wanted outta Mary Megan, depending on which diagnosis the world expert we called in was world expert in. In psychiatry, diagnosis comes last."

"What comes first?"

He put a hand on my shoulder. "Roy, you're gonna think this is crazy. In psychiatry, first comes treatment, then comes diagnosis."

"That is crazy," I said. "It goes against hundreds of years of medical science."

"You think this is a science?" he asked.

I didn't know what to say. For a while I stared at a duck

carving lines on the still lake. Finally I said, "I don't know, Malik. You sound pretty cynical."

"Think of Mary Megan, her face when she took out that piece of glass. That was the face of terror, right?"

"But this, you, what you're saying, it's nothing like my month with Ike. This is not what I expected."

"Good. That's the first real thing you said. Listen up: all you gotta do to learn here is keep your eyes open, your fly zipped, your feelings up front, and ask for help. Don't read any bullshit articles. Don't read, do. See. Feel. Do. And see everything in Misery in terms of Ike's suicide." He turned on his Walkman. "Aerosmith's 'Ama/ing'!" he cried. "Steven Tyler is my God!" He sang along and started to plug the earphones in.

"Wait," I said. He waited. "Why are all these experts denying their feelings about Dee?"

" 'Cause they mistake having no feelings for being smart." He trotted off.

"I'M SORRY IF I SOUNDED ANGRY yesterday when you called to set up our appointment," Christine was saying a few minutes later as we sat in my office in the attic of Toshiba, listening to the phwop phwop of tennis balls being hit three floors below. "I was feeling really bummed, and I kind of said all the wrong things."

She was sitting on the edge of her chair, her brown eyes fixed on mine. As I met them, she looked down into her lap. She was a thin thirty-one-year-old woman with hair the bleached blond of Madonna cut smartly mid-length, freckled white skin, a button nose, and small lips tense with dark scarlet lipstick, matching her dark scarlet nails. The white part in her scalp gleamed, a furrow between dark roots. She was all in black, as if in mourning-black sleeveless silk blouse with hints of black lace bra, short black skirt, the white of her kneecaps highlighting the pattern of black flowers of her black panty hose. Her perfume was musky. I had a hit of being attracted to her-and immediately felt it was wrong. I focused on putting it out of my mind.

"So what do you think about it, Dr. Basch?"

She was leaning forward intently, curious to hear my reaction to what she'd said. With a creeping sense of terror I real-

ized it was a little difficult for me to tell her my reaction to what she'd said since I'd been trying to put the sensual part of all this black and fake blond out of my mind and hadn't heard a single word. Glancing into my lap at my wristwatch-and trying to conceal my glancing from her-I saw that four minutes had passed. I'd missed hearing an important thing she'd said, and because it was important, I couldn't admit I hadn't heard it. Could I ask her to repeat it? Suppose it was that at her mother's funeral she'd been gang-banged by fourteen Hell's Angels and left for dead, and I respond with, "Uh, did you say something, Christine?" She was staring at me expectantly. In desperation I found myself saying, "Do you mind if I ask you two proverbs?"

"Proverbs? I… I guess not."

"What do people mean when they say, 'A rolling stone gathers no moss'?"

She sat back. "If I do just keep on dating and don't find a guy-I'll keep on going in my career with IBM and not have a family-not have that white picket fence and dog and babies-and just be a career woman?"

"Um-hmm. And, 'People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones' T'

"Okay," she said, smiling guiltily, as if I'd had some incredible insight in choosing this particular proverb, 'Til tell you about my mom."

Her mom, the wife of an Indiana farmer, knew how to slaughter animals and fix trucks. The mother/daughter relationship was a real love/hater. Somehow talking about Mom led back to her last boyfriend, Rocco. She said, "So I called Misery because of trouble with men."

"What's the trouble with men?"

"You tell me! You're one of 'em. What goes on in there with you? Do men feel? If so how, and what! What happens between receiving a message and sending back your response?" I stared at her, unable to send back a response. "See?" she said, shaking her head in dismay. "I read all the books. Y'know the Women Who Run with Wolves? Well, I'm a woman who ran to wolves, 'n' now I like run from wolves! The sex has always been great, but the talk? Pitiful. Ever since Rocco walked out on me I've been drinking more and smoking more dope and getting suicidal." She glanced down.

I peeked at my watch, figuring time was up. Only another ten minutes had passed? Half an hour to go? I looked up. She was staring at me.

"Is the session over?" She fluffed her blond hair, releasing scent

"My watch must've stopped."

"Eleven twenty-one." She uncrossed and recrossed her legs-slwish slwish went the rows of black flowers. Leaning forward and looking at me intently, she asked, "What about you! Where'd you go to school?"

Feeling pressured, I said, as blankly as possible, "Around here."

"And this is your first year as a psychiatrist?" I said nothing. "You can tell me, it's okay." Oh God. Is she a hyper-demanding borderline? I nodded. "And will you be talking to a supervisor about your work with me?"

"No," I said, lying, and then, "wait a second-did you say 'suicidal'?"

She blinked, and sat back. Her face drooped hi sorrow. She said that yes she was thinking of killing herself and had some pills stored up to do it. She didn't see why she should go on living after all the losses in her life, the latest being her father who had died just a few months before. "I can't stop crying. I cry for days on end! My heart is breaking!" She sobbed horribly, her body all scrunched up. I wanted to do what anyone would have done-put my arm around her shoulder, comfort her-but a wall seemed to go up and I tried to keep cool and figure out what to do to keep her from committing suicide.

"You got any Kleenex?" she asked, all stuffy-nosed and puffy.

"No."

"Well, why don't you!" she said angrily, and cried harder, the black mascara running down her cheeks, so she looked like a sad, lost clown. "How can you just sit there, so unfeeling?" Her accusing me of being unfeeling made me feel so unfeeling that in dread I drew away. "Say something! I'm about to kill myself and all you can say is nothing?"