Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

Next, Dr. Blair Heiler rose from his chair onstage and went to the podium to offer his comments. "Dr. Bozer did not pay enough attention to the LNT, the Latent Negative Transference. If he had, he would have been able to hate the patient and-"

"Hate?" cried a voice from the back. Heads turned.

It was A. K. Lowell, standing up against the back wall, a yellow pencil in her raised hand. "Hate?" she said again, triumphantly, having caught her rival red-handed. "What a slip!"

"No, no. Lovel" Heiler said defiantly, but his face reddened. For many of us this classic Freudian slip was a poignant reminder that he had failed his analysis because of problems with premature termination, anger, and sadism, or Latent Negative Transference, untreated. "Let me decenter myself," Blair said, sitting down, blinking his eyes. Then, with a tremor in his voice, he said, "Dr. Bozer would have been able to love his patient."

"You meant hate," A.K. said.

"Did not!"

"Did so!"

"Oy!" Schlomo said, standing. Up above us on the toy stage, with the other men onstage sitting down, Schlomo

seemed tall and solid. He seemed to grow even more solid and powerful as he put a hand on Blair's shoulder and fixed A.K. with his eyes, which, as he tightened his face in anger, became slits, ominous and terrible. It was incredible, just how much power seemed to be beaming out from this chunky little man onstage. "Lowell?" Schlomo said. "Sit!" A.K.'s face went ashen. "Sit!" Schlomo hissed. "Down!"

Humiliated, A.K. sat down.

I turned to Solini. His forehead was beaded with sweat. I too was sweating. Hannah's eyes were wide with horror. It was the same horror we'd felt that day when, in this same room, we'd seen Lloyal von Nott deny Ike's suicide. Now, our horror had returned. Where had it been?

Schlomo went on as if what had happened had not happened. He gave a classic Freudian explanation of "how this multiple gets men to schtup her." As he went on-amusing, intelligent, and sincere-the audience was in the palm of his hand. The three of us looked at each other. In this room almost a year before, Geneva Hooevens had gotten up, spoken out, asked for the truth. I wanted desperately to get up and speak out, but I felt as if a weight were holding me down, making my tongue too heavy to lift. I felt the weight of the others in the room who thought Schlomo was a great man, a brave man for confronting this delicate issue in therapy, and even braver because he could say that while of course the therapist was responsible for abusing the patient sexually and must be held accountable, the patient had a hand in provoking the abuse. I felt the weight not only of those present, but of all those who had sat in this room through its past, the weight of so many years of denying what was being seen in the moment, to preserve what was thought to be known.

"Within the consulting chamber," Schlomo said, "careful Freudian analysis will uncover exactly what leads these women to get themselves sexually abused."

"Right," Hannah whispered, loudly enough to be heard by a few people around us. "They all had light brown hair and looked like boys."

"And like goys," Henry added.

Schlomo glanced at us, but went on, "I applaud Dr. Shpitzer's brilliant program of risk management. Folks, it's just not worth the risk. To hold a patient's hand, to acquiesce

to what is, deep down, as much an aggressive act as an erotic one, a hug? Not worth the risk."

"But screwing a patient," I said to Solini, again loud enough for those around us to hear, "now that's worth the risk."

As Schlomo went on, his audience sat mesmerized, like snakes by a world-class charmer. Why couldn't I speak? Was I a coward? A defective person? Were Henry and Hannah too? Malik had said that what hurts the victim is not only the cruelty of the abuser but the silence of the bystander. Berry had told me that for women who had been sexually abused as children, the worst was when they'd been put in the position of knowing that their younger sister was being abused, and had not been able to speak up. I decided I had to say something. I braced myself. I would stand up and interrupt him. On three. One, two…

But I could not. What would I say? How would I say it? It was too big, and the weight of false histories in the room too heavy.

Schlomo went on, gathering momentum, drawing the audience toward him by his being such a high-class mensch. He finished. Applause rolled up toward him. Bowing, smiling, dancing on his toes as the applause splashed over him, he asked, "Any questions?"

Silence.

Now. I tried harder to gather my thoughts. As soon as I got one in line, I felt the pressure of my heart pounding and the eyes that would be upon me as heavy as rocks, and the line broke, and my mind went blank. I looked to Henry and Hannah. Both sat still, as if turned to stone.

Crack!

We jumped at the sound. A gunshot? We turned toward it, behind us in the back.

A. K. Lowell was on her feet again, her snapped yellow pencil in her upraised hands. Her face was flushed with fury. Suddenly I knew what she was about to do.

"You pervert!" she said. "You have sexually abused your patients for years. You sexually abused me for years."

Schlomo's hands fumbled at his chest as if he'd been shot or was having a heart attack and then drifted slowly down to his crotch.

A.K. walked out.

All eyes turned back to Schlomo, who stood stock-still.

"Let's go!" I said happily, loudly, to Henry and Hannah.

"Let's make our mover Henry said.

"Cool!" Hannah said.

The three of us stood up and walked. We walked lightly, triumphantly, walked straight on through the deadweight of all these normalized eyes, walked up the aisle and out the door in solidarity with Aliyah K. Lowenschteiner.

OUR TRIUMPH WAS short-lived. An hour later Mr. Beef Telly and Misery Security came to my office to escort me to Dr. Lloyal von Nott's office. As I passed by Viv's bulletproof, our eyes met. IB her eyes I saw fear.

A plush carpet gave way to a plusher carpet. I was face-to-face with Lloyal von Nott and Nash Michaels and the chairman of the board of Misery. They were all dressed identically in funereal suits and flat boxy ties, as if by a mother of triplets. Lloyal and Nash looked bad, older, burnt out. Lines like scratches spread across their foreheads, out from the corners of their eyes, and down in defining arcs from their nostrils to their masseters. With the hospital having lost its battle with the insurance industry, they'd been under a lot of pressure. Recently they had responded by releasing a high-gloss and soothing "Annual Misery Report," which made it sound like the hospital was as successful as Disneyworld. As I stared at them I saw them as shiny, buffed to a sheen with secrets, their lies a patina of denial.

"Hello," I said nervously. I felt vulnerable and alone. All my life I'd been in these situations in schools, called in before principals.

"Good-bye," von Nott said, from behind his desk.

"What?"

Mi. Telty's waUsie-taUae. squawked. He and Security moved to narrow the sightline to von Nott, as if to shield him from me, a Secret Service move.

"You are hereby informed," said Nash Michaels in a voice of Formica, "that this conversation is being recorded. If you would like to have your own counsel present, we will stop right now."

"What's this all about?"

"Counsel refused," Nash said, eyes slithering up to the

ceiling. The Toshiba transceiver, which went both ways, was on.

"We shan't keep you," von Nott said.

"Pm in no hurry."

"Ah, but you are. Your contract expires at midnight of thirty June, Wednesday next. We shan't renew your contract. On one July you are history."

"You can't do that."

"We have. You have failed. You are a failure. Your career is over."