Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

Despite my feeling so awake, so alive, so in tune with the onrush of summer, despite seeing so much new life in Berry, my patients, and my friends, there was a hum underneath, as if of heavy machinery, a hum of death. Deaths echo deaths. The hole left by all the deaths of the year was getting bigger, deeper, and wider. I was beginning to feel more and more gloomy about our chances of bringing Schlomo down, about Malik's disease, and about how the hell I was going to survive another two years of my training to become a dear and glorious physician-shrink in Misery.

One night on call I was walking with Solini to pick up my beeper in the Farben when we ran into Win Winthrop and

Arnie Bozer, standing in the foyer outside the Conference

Room, which now had a shiny brass plaque nailed to its door:

DR. ISAAC WHITE CONFERENCE ROOM COURTESY OF GLUCKSSPIEL APOTHBKE LTD.

"Well, hi there, Doctors," Arnie said cheerily. "How's business? Will you be attending today's Resident Support Group

with us?"

Henry and I had not gone to A. K. Lowell's group for

months.

"Fuck no, Arnie," Solini said.

"Locked out by that bitch," Win cried, enraged, smashing at the door with his fists. He seemed more bulked up than ever. The steroids would explain his rages too. "She meant it."

"Meant what?" I asked.

"Thanks for asking, Roy," Arnie said. "Dr. Lowell said she was tired of us showing up late. She locked the door on the hour. She's in there free-associating."

"Ah, the hell with it," Win said, with one final kick.

"Let's go."

"But how would that look?" Arnie asked. "If she should open the door early, and we're not here?"

"Yeah, you're right."

"So how's the family, Win?" Henry asked. He'd always liked Win's older son.

"Who knows? The bitch won't let me see 'em."

"You moved out?" I asked.

"She found out about me and Gloria."

"Gloria?" I said.

"Fire in the belly. And lower."

"But, man, like what about the kids?"

"I'm using the Gliicksspiel company lawyer. No way she'll get my money."

"You're not trying to work it out with her?" I asked.

"Cheaper to change. Like Errol. Long as you got a prenup. Warrior cash. 'Victories of the Heart!' "

"And what will you young doctors be doing come July the first?" Arnie asked.

"Quitting," Henry said. "Getting out of this shithole for

good."

"I'll be here for year two," I said. "And you?"

"National Institute of Mental Health Prize Fellow," Win said. "And on salary for Gliicksspiel. Bly says no more sibling shit, and we all better just grow up\ But hey listen: Errol referred me a cousin of the Kennedys!"

"Psychopharm is truly fascinating," Arnie said. "I'm rotating on the West myself and it's really interesting. Boy what we can do with drugs now. On July the first Dr. von Nott is sending me to the Harvard Business School, to specialize in the business of psychiatry. My subspecialty training will be in gerontology. The seniors are the fastest-growing segment of the American health-care system and America itself. My expertise is in death and dying."

"Death and dying, you?" I said.

"Working with the dying is the only truly time-limited psychotherapy."

Solini and I were speechless.

Finally Henry said, "Never seen you so happy, Arnie."

"Yes, yes," Arnie said, "I am one happy camper, yes."

"Great drug," Win said, "that Zoloft."

"You're on Zoloft?" Henry said.

"Yes, I am. I like myself on it, but my girlfriend loves me on it. We'll be sorry to lose you, Dr. Solini."

"Go fuck yourself, Arnie."

"Thanks, guys," Arnie said, "for sharing."

That on-call night was different. In tune with Viv, I found myself being curious about the people I was doctoring. Whether it was the voice floating on the other end of the line or the people locked up on the wards, even brief contacts were fun. It had nothing to do with how much time I had to spend with the person, and everything to do with how much I was really there with the person. I was finding out that connection can be made in a second or never made in fifty years of marriage, can be present from a thousand miles away and can be absent in the same room. That night, sometimes, I was really there.

"You've been awesome tonight," Viv said as I handed in my beeper at the end of the shift.

"How?"

"You have engaged in no bullshit. It's not something I

see very often around here. What the hell happened to you anyways?"

"You tell me. Malik says that whatever happened I'd be the last to know."

"Yeah, well, be careful, Cowboy."

"Why be careful?"

"The good ones get it in the neck."

Leaving, I saw Enrol Cabot in his Ferrari growl past, up toward the lead boxes and radioactive isotopes of the West. He had a new bumper sticker:

SO MANY PEDESTRIANS SO LITTLE TIME

"HAVE YOU GONE UP?" Jill asked a few days later, getting out of her rusty old Buick in front of Heidelberg East. It was raining, a first summer rain, big sprouting drops that hit the hot asphalt like notes from a jazz pianist on a wild riff, raising the scent of boyhood summer in Columbia. We faced each other as the raindrops popped upon our heads.

"You think?" I said. I was stunned by her fullness, her live-ness, her beauty, her sensual energy. Her blond hair was again long, as when I'd first met her. She had a sleek dark tan, as if bronzed.

"Lemme see." She put her palms to my temples, and stared into my eyes. I stared back into hers. It was intense. Rain dripped down onto my lips. She said, "You are on the beam! What a treat!"

I went to kiss her. She pulled back. I asked, "What's wrong?"

"You're back with Berry, right?"

"Well…"

She kicked me hi the shin. "You lying sack of shit!"

"Oww-wow!" I screamed, bending to rub my leg. "Okay, okay, yes I am."

"Good. Someone like you should be back with someone like her."

"And you? You've got someone?" She nodded. My heart fell. "Who?"

"A guy. It's fabulous."

"Fabulous?"

"Mostly. But what can you do? I mean he is a guy. Can we walk?"

"In the rain?"

"Sure. I love rain! Everything is so green! Like the tropical sea."

We walked through the woods, down the ravine, along the asphalt path through the oaks around the lake, then down into a marshy hollow — where, last New Year's Eve, they'd found the frozen body of Sedders, the Man Who Couldn't Get Admitted to Misery in Time and Had Died Trying — and then onto the mossy carpet up into the high pines, where the scent vaporized up into the dampness of the day.

When we started walking, there were light circles of dry road under the trees that overhung the dark, wet road. We walked for so long that, after the rain had ended, by the time we retraced our steps the road was dry, and what had been light circles of dryness under the trees had now become dark circles of wet. The rain had soaked through the leaves, and the trees had shaded the hot sun, preventing it from drying the damp circles under them. And maybe it was the day itself, or the woman, so bright and alive and fulfilled that I found myself worrying that being with me might jinx her; whatever it was, this cojoint arising of wettening and drying circles was like a metaphor for our lives, no longer lovers but friends. What a challenge to me, a man, to have a woman friend. I who had been taught from my first awareness of boyhood that either you ignored girls completely or you tried to get into their pants.

Jill said she had "gone up." In the Galapagos, a red translucent ball had rolled along the grass at her. "Suddenly I was going faster than light all reddish up to a big silver spaceship." The aliens looked just like the pictures in the tabloids at supermarket checkout counters, less scary than friendly, "like small gooey puppies." Then somehow she'd hitchhiked from the Galapagos to Puerto Rico, where she visited an astronomer who worked at the radio telescope that was trying to receive messages from other life in the universe.