Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

Solini and I had finally gotten Malik to talk about his cancer. We'd encouraged him to go to the world experts, at the world's best hospitals, down in Boston.

"After what you've seen of the world experts here?" he'd asked.

"Cancer's different," I'd said.

"Right. You have a choice: either get poisoned first and die, or die. You see the paper today? They're finally gonna regulate pesticides a little. Just in time, eh? The time frame of humanity is so stupid! Throw the shit on the lettuce, dump it in the water,

and by the time they can prove it kills people, the fat cats who cashed in are retired to Florida. Shit."

Now, Solini and I sat with Malik out on the porch of Heidelberg East, waiting for Bronia to come pick him up. Malik was physically weak, and subdued. Dazed, even foggy. With the year ending, and Solini leaving Misery, we tried to talk with Malik about the horrors we'd seen all year long, and about what more we could do about Schlomo. We wanted advice, but Malik gave none; sitting quietly, he only listened. We lapsed into what felt to me an uncomfortable and uneasy silence. It was a relief when Bronia drove up in the old VW bus, its license plate now one of maximum irony:

BREATHE

We walked out together, a piece of his luggage in each of our hands. Malik walked slowly, on wobbly legs, arms around our shoulders, leaning on us both.

"That sunlight feels terrific!" Malik said, blinking in the glare. It was the first hot day of the year. "You guys should see that forsythia through these amber lenses-I mean it is wild!"

"Cool," Henry said, looking at this wildness and sneezing paroxysmally.

We helped hoist Malik up into the passenger seat.

Through the window I asked, "Do you pray to God, Malik?'

"I don't know about God," he said. "All I know is that I'm not God, and I'm asking for help from something else, outside me. Step Three." He sighed and looked around. "I pray to whatever doesn't exclude others, but includes them. To the flower in the compost, the compost in the flower. I ask for help from this." His eyes swept the landscape, and ours followed. Suddenly I saw the hills like waves and the fields like tides, and the dark green pines hiking up the mountains to crest in white snowcaps like breakers on stone, the light green new maples and indomitable grasses flowing back down into the valleys, the hollows, the glitter of water seeking ocean, then sky, then rain. "From the Divine intelligence behind all this."

"Omaln!" Bronia said, mashing the gears, letting out the raspy clutch.

"Wait!" Henry cried out Bronia waited. "Where will you be?"

"Around, awhile," Malik said. Then he smiled, and got that "I'm your coach and I'm callin' the play" look in his eye, and said, "You listenin' up?" Henry and I said we were listening up. "Good. Live your understanding, right now, or it'll destroy you. Got it?"

"Cool," Solini said, "but what if you don't have all mat much?"

Malik chuckled. "Live what you have. And remember: never go to a doctor you see on TV. So long."

MY TURMOIL THAT night was intense. Berry was asleep. Awake, my mind was going over and over my failures as a shrink, a lover, a son, brother, uncle, person, human-even, staring at Berry's cat staring icily at me, as a failed friend to cats.

In the static of all these failures I heard Malik's voice saying, "If you ain't close to God anymore, who moved?"

I got up out of bed and went to a linty corner of my turret. I got down on my knees. The floorboards hurt my kneecaps. The action felt embarrassing. Closing my eyes, in a churlish whisper I said:

"Please help me? Thanks a lot" It was all I could do not to add,"Youbigdickhead."

Whom was I asking for help?

"The Heroic Saga of Roy G. Basch, Great American" was providing all kinds of images: Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments with God in white beard and bathrobe in the puffy clouds, or the vengeful God of widowed Rabbi Ritvo our tenant on the other side of the wall of our two-family in Columbia who at night screamed in Yiddish at his two spinster daughters.

I was not asking for help from that God. That God was merely my mind. I was not asking for help from myself.

Could I have been asking for help from the eternal disconnections, and the eternal connections that held even them?

Twenty

SOLINI, HANNAH, AND I, as the damp sun of May turned into the flatiron sun of June, began to take action around Misery.

We became extraordinarily curious about the money our patients were spending to stay at Misery. We let them know that it was over twelve hundred dollars a day. Somehow their insurance companies found out that the patients were being labeled with not one but two or three DSM diagnoses solely to keep them in Misery longer, so that the hospital and their doctors could make more nice green money. One day Solini and I were strolling past Emerson. Seeing once again the sign DISSOCIATIVE HOUSE, we felt it our duty to send individual letters to the major insurance companies letting them know that ever since they'd stopped paying for "Borderline Personality Disorder" and started paying for "Dissociative Disorder," Blair Heiler had switched diagnoses. Wasn't it funny how, in the hard science of psychiatry, diagnoses could be so soft?

Insurance started hassling Heiler and others about payment, decapitated right and left, and refused to authorize more nice green money. Patients and their families got caught in the cross fire. We encouraged said patients to walk their concerns directly over to the office of Nash Michaels, Chief Counsel of Misery, or to Dr. Lloyal von Nott, Chief of Misery. Of course patients and their families could not even get past the secretary guarding the outer office to get to the secretary guarding the inner office, let alone to the men themselves. Luckily, somehow the unlisted home numbers of the men themselves-von Nott, Michaels, Heiler, Cabot, Dove, and Lowell-all became readily available to the patients. These unlisted numbers were dialed.

Somehow, Lloyal von Nott's memo to us inviting us to the Misery Capital Campaign Luncheons, where we were asked to reveal the names of our rich patients so that Lloyal and Nash Michaels could hit them up for donations to Misery, turned up on the desk of the Boston Globe Spotlight Team. Failing to get through the barricades of secretaries to Lloyal and Nash at Misery, the Spotlight Team dialed their home numbers. The newspaper asked whether this memo, flying in the face of medical ethics, let alone common decency, was perhaps a joke, or a hoax? The media assumed that it, and their signatures on the bottom of it, could not be real.

Nash Michaels and Lloyal von Nott responded with silence.

Silence provoked the Globe further. It and TV began trailing them around with videocams, in much the same way they had done with drug dealers, mafiosi, and no-show judges. Lloyal and Nash became no-show shrinks. They flitted to and fro wearing sunglasses and hats and riding in big cars with darkened windows. They unlisted their unlisted numbers. It was amazing how fast this happened. All in a matter of weeks.

We also went after the other side of the ongoing war at Misery, insurance companies. Gilda and Hannah prepared a legal form letter for clients and their families who were having trouble with coverage-either being denied admission to Misery or being kicked out-to send to their insurance companies. Said letter carried documentation of the severity of said client's mental illness, and stated that any injuries to said client or family including suicide were events said insurance would be held strictly liable for. Misery depended on its relationship with insurance, especially with the big mothers like Blue Cross and Liberty Mutual and John Hancock. Since insurance was now calling the shots and could cancel Misery's provider status in a second, in a few days limousines with darkened windows could be seen driving up the hill to the Farben. The limos carried insurance executives, all pink and beer-bellied and encased in the same kind of pin-striped armor as von Nott and his boys. Meetings were held to find out-as one secretary told us: