Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

The word "failure" bit into me. My dream-my father's dream-of my being a doctor was over. "B-b-but y-you have no grounds."

Von Nott pointed to a thick manila folder on his desk. "Grounds aplenty."

"Y-y-you're getting rid of me b-because I saw Schlomo D-D-Dove have sexual intercourse with Zoe."

"You saw nothing."

"I know what I saw."

"You saw nothing."

"Are you saying I didn't see what I saw?"

"You saw nothing. Unless you saw what wasn't there. This, perhaps you've learned this year, is called an hallucination."

"A. K. Lowell, today in grand rounds-"

"We don't take cases," Nash said, "that we can lose."

Suddenly the breath seemed to go out of me. I felt weak and light-headed. I felt silenced.

The door burst open. Telly crouched, reaching for his stun-gun.

"Solini?" I cried out. The little guy stood there, rolling his wrists.

"When Viv calls stat, you move! You pull a Malik-you stick together!"

"Get out," von Nott said.

"Fuck you!"

"Dr. Basch has just been terminated, and you-" "Fuck you!" Henry shouted, and reached into his jacket. Von Nott ducked down behind his desk; Telly and Security and the chairman dropped to the rug.

What? They thought Henry was reaching for a weapon?

It was a letter. Throwing it down on the glossy desk, he shouted, "Fuck you! I fuckin' quit and fuck you!"

All at once I saw it. Their having their thugs and lawyers and board chairs here, their ducking down behind desks. "Henry! They're afraid of us!"

"Scared shitless of us, man, yeah!"

"You guys," I said, "are afraid of us!"

"Tell it, Roy! Of us!"

The three men in suits exchanged glances. This was outside protocol, beyond the flowcharts and dangling boxes that defined them.

In that moment I saw all the other people that year who'd died and left, died and left. All of them were standing with us, sticking together with us. Even dead and gone their presence right then right there in that pathetic office was vital, powerful. They were here with Henry and me. We all were crowding out these three boys before us, crowding them out, these three boys dressed up so hard to look like real men. Standing there, I saw, in these men, dead souls. Much as in real medicine I'd learned to see death itself, flitting like a lost moth around people's bodies. I felt a rush of joy, and said, "You fuckers are scared to death of us."

"To like death, man!" Henry sang out, squinching up his face. He was rolling now. "And one more thing: fuck you!"

"Ridiculous," von Nott said, standing back up. I'm sure he thought that his face was stone. But the denial was so thin, splotches of the real bled through. He'd been found out, his secret seen.

"Scared to death!" I said joyfully. "And fuck you all!"

"Diddily diddily death!" Henry sang.

"As we often said in Europe during the war," von Nott said, " 'You haven't a snowball's chance in hell.' "

"The war?" I asked, surprised he'd bring that up now. "And where were you during the war?"

"In Switzerland. I was neutral."

"In that war, you were neutral?'

"Get out."

Looking at each in turn, into each set of eyes calcified by cash and deception, I said, "You are dead souls. Dead fucking souls. And you're being killed like you killed Dee White."

"Like Ike, man!" Solini said. 'Tell it!"

"Out!"

" 'Check out the real situation-check it out check it out!' " Henry sang.

We danced out, shaking hips, waving index fingers, jiving, singing Bob.

Carried down the hallway on our exhilaration, we found ourselves staring at a nameplate:

SCHLOMO DOVE, M.D., F.R.A.P.S.

"Let's do Schlomo!" Henry shouted.

"Yeah!" I said, and was about to bang on the door when I was stopped by a weird sound coming from inside his office, a raspy sound like when you try to shift gears with a bum clutch. Then I recognized it. It was the defining sound of our times. "A shredder?"

"Turning the truth, man, into confetti. Be cool, Roy. Catch you later."

Solini walked away, to see a patient. I walked over to Viv. She buzzed me in.

"Thanks for sending Solini," I said, feeling safe behind the bulletproof. "How did you know?"

"Cowboy, you looked bad! So how'd it go?"

I told her. As I spoke, the lift left me. I started to feel down, really down. What had I done?

"Congratulations," Viv said.

"For what?"

"Bein' fired from Misery. Wear it like the Congressional Medal of Honor."

"Terrific. I'll have to change the title of my autobiography from 'Notes of an Overachiever' to 'I Was a Failure at Misery.' "

"Failure? In whose eyes, theirs? Thank God they dint call you a success!" I laughed. "Listen, Cowboy-doll," she said, her long fake lashes flying up toward her blond beehive, so that her hazel eyes widened. "I've seen it over and over again: if you're any good, they get rid of you. No one who's any good stays long in Mount Misery."

How right she was. They'd gotten rid of anyone "on the beam": me and Henry and Hannah and Malik and Geneva Hooevens, and many other good therapists, now out in the

community. They had succeeded in weeding us out. We were history, soon to be revised. In a few years the word would be that Ike White had not killed himself at all but had died of a fatal disease, say a heart attack, why not? Nobody would be around to tell the truth.

All over America sincere, intelligent, sensitive, and enthusiastic young men and women were heading into these training programs. They hoped to open up even more, and learn how to help those caught in the hell of mental illness. Instead they would learn to close down and shut down and become someone special. They would buy terrific cars and after years of training be able to look into the mirror and-rather than see the truth of the person looking back out of the mirror-see the image.

There would always be a Lloyal, a Nash, always be an Errol, always a Heiler, a Schlomo Dove. The bad news is that you get rid of one, and another takes his place. The good news is that in rising, they are all dying.

And maybe the better news is that with psychiatrists becoming drug pushers instead of listeners, the actual work with human beings will devolve to the ones better at it, the nurses and social workers and mental health workers and alcoholics and addicts in recovery and pastoral counselors way down the flowchart of Misery, who in many ways had done the most to help patients this year. Those who, with patients day in and day out, through chance encounters and common sense, offering man-on-the-street wisdom gained through facing the suffering in their own lives, helped people heal. Like the basically cheerful often dark-skinned workers in Buildings and Grounds who talked with patients while emptying the trash or mopping the floor or cutting the grass. Years later, if you asked a former patient what had made a difference to make them better, they would point not to a drug or a shrink, but to a connection made with one of these people. These Vivs. And one of the most hopeful signs, now, was how patients themselves were organizing, forming support groups with like-minded others, like Zoe's TALL for the abused, or MDA-Manic Depressive Association-to empower each other to find sensible, commonsense therapists out in the community, and to resist the authority of the world experts in the great institutions, all the Miserys.

"But people think these jackasses are good therapists," I said to Viv, "these world experts. When a relative gets in trouble, people ask their doctor to find them 'the best psychiatrist' and they get thrown to guys like von Nott, or Heiler, or Errol-or Schlomo! There's no way to measure who's any good. Everything takes place behind closed doors. Nobody knows."

"I do."

"How?"

"Simple. With the good ones, their patients get better."