Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

"Lizzie Qun!" I say. "Thank God for you!"

"Scree-op!"

"And for you," I say to Berry, appreciating how long we've been together, how hard we've tried to walk the walk together, how together we have finally crossed the divide that separates the sterile from the fertile. Tears come to her eyes, blurred by my own.

"Hey!"

Startled, Berry and I look around. Who said that?

Lizzie? We stare at each other.

"Her first word?" I ask.

"Lizzie?" Berry asks. "Did you say 'Hey'?"

"Scree-op! Amut!"

We laugh.

Berry squeezes my hand. "C'mon, love. Let's hike on down."

Lizzie squeals with delight when she sees me take out the Tough Traveler backpack, her big blue friend. I lift her up, and despite the weight, feel light, as if I too am being lifted. We walk to the edge of the canyon.

It takes my breath away-Berry's too; I hear her "Wow!" — the canyon stretching on and on as far as the eye can see and down so far that the sheep look like toys on a child's blanket.

I'm speechless, jolted out of myself into a perception that's free of any doctrine of a landscape or even of perception itself, a perception of what is. As Malik had shown me, sometimes in therapy you chance upon the real person right there with you, right there right then without bullshit, and I can almost hear Malik's tough, gym rat's voice telling me:

"Live your understanding, kid, right now, or it'll destroy you."

We start on down the trail into the canyon, toward the ruins said to be sacred. The baby on my back, nipple to her lips, starts exchanging formula for air.

THE WHITE HOUSE ruin faces us, across the riverbed from where we sit. There on the sandy bank of the river is a small grove of cottonwoods and aspens. In this lap of shade, a Navajo man sells jewelry spread out on the hood of his pickup truck. Lifting up above the green tufts of the trees, our eyes are drawn to the cave.

The cave is set in the cliff face like a dark teardrop set on its side. Our eyes search the blackness. The Anasazi, the "Old People," the humans first here tens of thousands of years ago, built these dwellings of wood and fired mud. The lower row of dwellings are faded rose, the color of the cliff. Ladders lead up from their flat roofs to the doorways of another house, set back a little, like a hat set back on a head. This topmost dwelling is white, still white after millennia. It shines through the shadows. The current crop of humans have named it "the White House."

Earlier this morning we read several of the letters and postcards that had been awaiting our arrival.

One postcard showed, front-on, the towering bow of a freighter riding low in rough seas. The bow, fluted from a sharp edge at the bottom to an elegant furl at the top, was crashing down on a rough swell that lifted the foam almost up to its name: Akatsuki Mam. There in its path was a tiny rubber life raft with an outboard motor, its name: Greenpeace. Standing in the life raft, wearing orange rough-weather slickers upon which was drawn the three-pronged, propeller-shaped symbol for radioactive death, are two men. On the other side of the card, the message:

Dickheads Battle Plutonium Death-Ship!

Wish you were here. Love, Thorny.

From Jamaica came a postcard of a fat tourist wearing a crappy straw hat, perched on a thin donkey. On the flip side:

There's a lotta life out there, man, But you gotta open your eyes to see it, And then it is Ideal. Be cool. Love, Henry.

From Hannah in Wyoming there was a long letter handwritten on "100 % tree-free, chlorine-free, acid-free EcoPaper, made of hemp fiber-which requires only one-fourth of the land needed by the same amount of wood-and cereal straw, a by-product of grain production. I thought you'd like it because from the 1st century on, Chinese craftspeople created beautiful papers made from hemp, straw, and common plants." Hannah

was seeing patients as a lay analyst, and doing a lot of work with her Jungian rodeo-archetype analyst. Things were going well with Gilda and the livestock, though better with the livestock. "Gilda and I are making fairly beautiful music together, although there are problems. Loveyakid, H."

My mother in Columbia was full of news about her life and golf, and about how nice my father's tombstone looked. Once, when my father was alive, she had pulled me aside and said that what she wanted on her own tombstone was an arrow pointing to his tombstone and the words:

He Risted Me Info Tlis.

Now she had mellowed. She had chosen a single stone for them both.

I asked Berry, "If you had on your tombstone, 'She Was Wonderful at Relationships,' would that be enough for you?"

"Yes and no."

"How's that?"

"It's good, but I'd want a second line, something like, 'And She Was a Good President Too.' " We laughed. "How 'bout you?"

"'He Was Enough.'"

"Oh boy."

From Viv, in Esalen, California, came a note on stationery crowded with flowers:

Cowboy,

Misery downsized and they put Communications under Security. I was fired. They were scared of Primo and the rest of the old Security so they herded them into a room under false pretenses and then surrounded the room with the new Security-an outside group-and fired them and opened the door and they had to walk through the gauntlet. In a "total-quality-control" effort to make Misery "leaner and meaner" they laid off 40 % of the workforce. Nash and Lloyal both got big raises, Nash got $234,000 and Lloyal $432,000. I'm using my savings to do the human potential movement thing. Hot tubs V all. Primo sends his best.

Love, Viv.

Poppa Doc, the analyst I'd never gone back to, sent a bill on a note: When you look into a very small looking glass, you see only yourself.

The final letter we read last night was overnight mail from Zoe, telling us about the last days of the trial of Schlomo Dove.

Had there ever been a trial so funny?

Berry and I had been in the courtroom up until the jury went out, when we had to leave for Arizona. Over and over again, like everyone else in the courtroom, we'd found ourselves cracking up with laughter.

A. K. Lowell was first to bring suit for malpractice. Schlomo created many delays. Through his lawyer, a woman named Joanne Green who looked like a sweet young thing but had the soul of a crocodile, Schlomo took both the high road and the low. First he tried to bribe A.K. Then he tried to threaten A.K. Finally he went public with slime on A.K. He responded to the Globe's stories on two other "anonymous victims"-Lily and Zoe-by calling them "a Misery conspiracy" and reiterating his claim that "Schlomo is the real victim here." Then he tried to settle with A.K. out of court.

A.K. did not budge. The threat of my going public with her ledger was too great. A date was set for trial.

Schlomo's going public made jury selection difficult. He'd done the talk shows. Everyone had been entertained by him in print and on TV. Schlomo was great on TV. Selection of twelve reasonable, schizoid, reclusive folk who hadn't seen him, or had seen him and had not formed an opinion about him, took time, especially as Schlomo insisted that the only real "jury of Schlomo's peers" would be a dozen top Freudian analysts. Anyone else would be grounds for appeal. It was said that his alleged patient, Dershowitz, was watching.

Twice, just as the trial was about to start, Schlomo pulled the old Mafia trick of crushing chest pain, landing him in intensive care in my old hospital, "the House of God." The second crushing chest pain resulted in the judge convening the trial in the hospital. Schlomo made a terrific recovery. The trial began.

Schlomo's defense was that it was all fantasy. A.K.'s contention was that it was all reality. Both called in world-expert

forensic psychiatrists as witnesses, who drew totally opposite conclusions, along the lines that you would expect.