Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

Malik and I were alone. I felt our time as precarious as quicksilver. I had a tremendous urge to talk, to ask everything, fast.

Then the strangest thing happened.

We just sat there side by side.

We just sat there.

Eyes open to the madness of the airport, and then beyond, to the lights of the circling planes blinking in the hazy summer night like the fireflies of Tuscany that had lit up Cherokee's heart for a brief moment a year before, we sat there in silence together.

'TIME TO GO, love." Bronia was standing before us with a wheelchair.

A wheelchair? Malik? This friend of mine who, my first month in Misery-it seemed a second ago now-had been chasing down every ball Mr. K. had hit, and with that hoisting-a-turkey-onto-a-truck stroke, was somehow getting it back, now unable to walk? Oh God.

I wheeled him through the frantic crowd to the metal detector. This was it.

"Let me know where you are," I said, "so we can keep in touch."

"You too."

"Wish I knew what I'll be doing."

He nodded. "About 'doing'?"

"Yeah?"

"We'll both be doing the same thing, kid."

"Which is?'

"Learning."

"Learning what?"

'To die well."

A last hug. Bones. He got up out of the wheelchair, walked slowly through the metal detector, and joined Bronia on the other side. She gestured him to get back in, but he started to walk. He walked a few steps. A little out of breath, he stopped, and turned to wave. I waved back. He turned away again and walked a few slow steps, coughing, and walked a few more. I couldn't take my eyes off him. He was the most important organism on the face of the earth right then. The love between us was stretching and stretching to thinner and thinner stuff, until it was as fragile as a filament of breath, and as unbreakable.

As I watched, he bent down, as he had the first day I'd met him and had done so often in the course of this miserable year that I'd stopped noticing it, bent down and picked up a piece of litter. Holding it in his hand, he walked on.

CANYON DE CHELLY

"The planning took place on the top of the Beautiful

Goods. They planned how the strong Earth's Heart should be

formed;

How the Mixed Chips should be used, and

How the Sacred Mountain should be made.

How the Sacred Mountain should be made, Like the Most-High-Power-Whose-Ways-Are-Beautiful."

— NAVAJO MOUNTAIN CHANT

Twenty-two

TOGETHER WE WATCH the Navajo woman pass by. She seems to come suddenly out of the high desert, a lean black dog following after. White-haired, bronze face weathered, she wears a long purple skirt and brown leather vest. Her blouse is the bright red of arterial blood. Gold lightning flashes across it. Silver and turquoise, like water and sky, are around her neck. A golf umbrella, sectored blue and white, and proclaiming CITIBANK, shades her. She walks past us without eye contact and slips through what seems solid sandstone at the mouth of the trail down into the canyon, her black dog following. As suddenly as they have come, they are gone.

"Did you see that?" Berry asks. "The way she just came out of nowhere and then moved through that rock?"

"Yes," I say, stroking her cheek. "Like a mirage."

I'm leaning back against a boulder. Berry is lying against me, her hair nestled into my chin. Lizzie Qun, naked, is asleep on her chest, her morning bottle, interrupted by sleep, in one hand. The other hand clutches the edge of Berry's bra, white lace in tiny fingers. To feel the sun, Berry has opened her blouse to the waist. Her breasts lift and lower Lizzie's head with each breath.

We are sitting on the ground near the canyon rim. The late-June morning sun is clear and warm and revving up to hot We sit on Lizzie's green quilt covered with purple birds with triangle yellow beaks and rounded bottoms like toy boats. Our quilt is spread amidst the scrub. As far as the eye can see is rough cracked land, sagebrush, rock and red dune, and clattering sky. On the horizon, a hint of buttes. Above them, dark clouds. We are over a mile high.

"We were right to choose this," I say. "It's so solid. Basic. What a relief."

"Really. Two Jews, a Chinese baby, and a Navajo woman- out in the middle of a desert."

"It's your normal American family, on the way to their new home."

We laugh. Lizzie stirs. She's eight months and four days. She was four months when we met her, and now it's four months and four days that we've had her. The balance of her lifetime has shifted-she's been with us more than she's been with anyone else. Berry and I went back a second time to China, to Changsha, in Hunan Province, to adopt her from Social Welfare Center Number One. We carried her to the ninth floor of the Xiangjiang Hotel while her passport and adoption papers were processed. Having crashed from our infertility, we'd had doubts about adoption. But then, leaning into Me, we'd said, "Yes."

Lizzie has a round face with plump cheeks and a mouth made of rose petals. That first time we saw her in the orphanage, we were taken with her eyes. Swaddled so she couldn't much move, she must have lived through her vision. She touches everything with her eyes, as the blind touch everything with their other senses. Her eyes are shaped like teardrops set on their sides. The irises are as dark as the pupils, so that even in the bright desert sunlight you can't see where the matter of the iris ends and the emptiness of the pupil begins. Her eyes give an illusion of wisdom. Four-hundred-year-old eyes. Malik eyes. Her face is so familiar to us already that non-Asian babies seem foreign. We can't stop kissing her.

Yesterday we arrived at Fort Defiance, Arizona, the regional seat of the Indian Health Service, to start our two years of service, I as a doctor, Berry as a teacher and child psychologist. I'll be doctoring a lot of alcoholics and drug addicts. It's been almost a year since I was fired from Misery.

"Shall we open the letter now?" Berry asks.

Awaiting our arrival here yesterday were several letters and postcards. One letter was from India, Dalhousie, in the Himalayas. The handwriting was unfamiliar. I knew it concerned Malik.

"No," I say, "let's wait till we're at the ruins, down in the canyon. They say it's a sacred place."

"Can I make a suggestion, hon?"

'Try me."

"Breathe."

I laugh and do so. "Breathe," Malik had always said. "Find the breath."

This morning in U.S. News & World Report, the issue devoted to "The Best Doctors and Hospitals in America," they said that the best psychiatric hospital was McLean but the second best was Mount Misery, and the Best Administrative Psychiatrist in America was Dr. Lloyal von Nott, and that among the "Fifty Best Psychiatrists Under Thirty-Five" was Dr. Winthrop Winthrop.

"What's wrong?" Berry asks. Startled, I wonder how she does it, always seems to know. I tell her what had come into my mind. She says, a little sharply, "Can't you just be here, with us?"

"I want to, but that magazine set my mind spinning like crazy. They call those jokers the best?"

"So what else is new? It's called the 'normal world,' right? We're here to find an alternative. Remember?"

"But it's outrageous*"

"Apucha! Kee-ka!"

Lizzie is awake, looking at us, sensing the tension. Berry sits her up. Perfect balance, legs crossed. A little Buddha.

"Play with your daughter. She doesn't know the meaning of that word."

"She doesn't know any words yet."

"Look at her. She wants her dad to be with her. Play with her. I'll clean up."

As I look at her, Lizzie sees me looking, gives a yelp, and smiles. Smiles not only with her mouth but with her whole body, fat shoulders scrunching and arms lifting toward me and fingers grasping not just me but my seeing her-her seeing my seeing. As I join her in this seeing-play, something melts in me, an edge dissolves and all at once I'm with her. The small tight ball of my self breaks apart, letting something else expand. I'm in the world and of the world, feeling the morning sun on my back, the cool breeze on my cheeks, the sense of my wife and baby with me.