Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

But what did the victory really mean? It was a civil not a criminal victory. Schlomo had been convicted of no crime. His legal expenses, and the monetary awards to A.K., whatever they would turn out to be, would be paid by his malpractice insurance. He would not do a single day in jail, or pay a single penny. In fact, since the award could be as high as a million, all of our malpractice premiums would go up, including mine. We would wind up paying, not him. He himself would no longer be required to carry malpractice, since now he would lose his license. Even though he would no longer have a license, there was nothing in the law to keep him from seeing patients as usual, as long as he didn't prescribe them drugs, which he didn't do anyway. His practice might well flourish.

Now that he was famous, a household name, he might well make a killing with a book, a film, a miniseries. In her letter, Zoe said:

Schlomo's lawyers called me, and Lily, and want to settle out of court. To spare everybody embarrassment, and since he's already been found guilty, we probably will.

TALL is going great. The number of abusers around here is incredible. There's talk of making it a national hot line.

The bill to make sex with a patient a crime is still stalled in the legislature. A state rep named DiMesi keeps shelving it. He's a lawyer with a local practice. When someone asked him why he keeps shelving it, he said, "You think I'm gonna get behind somethin' dat says it's illegal for me to pinch my client's ass?"

But I can't tell you how happy I am, to be working for TALL, doing something I believe in! We're all standing TALL!

Do you know how important you were to me that whole year? How important you still are? You were, you are. Thank you for my life.

In friendship, Zoe P.S. Any more news of Dr. Malik?

Now we sit across the stream from the White House ruin. Our eyes sometimes rest on the cave mouth and dwellings, sometimes are drawn up the face of the cliff, up the sheer mass along the streaks of purple and red leaking down the rock from the rim and glistening with eons of leachate, metallic ore, dark iron. I take the letter out of my shirt pocket. Fingers trembling, I open it. We read it together.

Our friend Leonard Malik died peacefully today. The body will be cremated and its ashes scattered here in Himalayas. Donations in his memory may be sent to any endeavor which, in his words, "promotes an enquiry into the meaning of life, or to the orphanage here." He asked us to write to you, his dear friend, and to leave you with this message:

"Find the breath, kid. Don't forget to breathe."

With you in sorrow, V.Thakar

I find myself smiling. Now I see what he had been showing me all year long. Suffering is forgetfulness, forgetting to breathe, forgetting to be with the life-breath, the spirit. Healing is connection. Isn't that all, isn't that it?

My mind's eye fills with Malik, from the first time I saw him, on the tennis court when I mistook him for a patient and Mr. K. for a doctor, through all the "clicks" I'd felt with him, to my doing the physical on him when he pointed to the acro-mial knobs of his shoulders and said, "I haven't seen these bones since I was eight years old," and finally to our sitting in silence, saying good-bye. He had asked me for help. I had given it. We had helped each other.

I see him sitting front and center in the photo I carry with me at all times, the color photo of our ragtag group at the airport: his body is sagging, as if against an inner dark weight, and leans to one side. His face is pale and constrained, more pale even than Zoe's face, and more constrained even than Bronia's, but his eyes are alight. He is free.

"It's so simple. That was his gift, to show me how simple it is."

"What's that?" Berry asks sleepily.

"How to be with people, help them grow. What helps is this, just this."

"Mmm. Everything's simple," she murmurs, "if you're really here."

"It's like seeing and loving go together."

"That's excellent, yes."

We sit together in the stillness, in the movement of connection with each other and with nature. The line between living and dead seems fuzzy, as if you could cross back and forth easily. This letter from India might help us cross, if we wish, but urges us to stay on this side for now, watching the flow of the stream and the flow of our grieving, part of all that is human and even all that is not human but merely life, even the life of the stream and the life of the rock.

Suddenly I realize that the night before I had had my first dream about my father since his death. I tell Berry about it.

"He was running upstairs to the second floor of our old house, the two-family we owned. Rabbi Ritvo rented the other half. My father was wearing his raincoat and his rain hat-he looked like a salesman back from a two-week road trip. The hat was one of those brimmed ones, from the thirties. He ran upstairs and seemed eager to talk to me. Eager, but worried. His voice was shaky-either with fear or with love, I don't know which-he'd often get teary when he first saw me again after I'd been away for a while-and he said to me, 'Son, I've just been named Best Dentist on the Jolly Jews basketball team!' And I said, with enthusiasm, That's great, Dad!' "

"Wonderful dream," Berry says. "You've made peace with him now."

"With his spirit, yeah." I think of poor Cherokee Putnam, having the colossal bad luck to get me as his therapist during my love affair with Sigmund Freud. If he'd gotten Malik, or me now, he'd still be alive. I say to Berry, "You know, I think I understand how to help people now, I really do."

"Shhh. She's asleep, so we should get some sleep too." Snuggling in, she murmurs, "But that's good, Roy, that's real good. That's why you wanted to be a doctor in the first place, right? Mmmm."

I raise my eyes above the green tufts of the cottonwoods and aspens to the White House ruin, sitting atop the other stone dwellings, and see how the humans who'd lived there a thousand years ago are a part of the rock, by virtue of their endeavor and understanding, and then my sight enlarges to take in the teardrop-shaped cave, and I see how the dwellings are a part of the cave, by virtue of the humans, and then my eyes start up the cliff face, and I see how the cleft is part of the cliff, by virtue of the wind and the rain, and then my eyes slip up the cliff face between two iron oxide streaks to the rim, seeing how the declivity of the canyon is part of the plateau, by virtue of the wind and the water and the fire in the earth, and then my vision lifts lightly up off the trampoline of the rim into the desert sky the color of tropical water, seeing how the sky is part of the earth, by virtue of life itself. That fact is the Divine: the being part of the whole.

And I see how psychiatry had been a mutilation of the Divine, the ripping apart of the fabric, the fragmenting of

the whole into parts, the taking of what was in fact the breathing of the soul-the whole rich unknown life of the spirit-and cramming it into a tiny island of the known, named "psychology."

Ike White. Why had he killed himself? Because he lived two seconds ahead of time, or two seconds behind. In expectation, or in memory. He was never present. He never looked you in the eye, never touched you. He had a secret, and that secret was his keeping secrets. He didn't know how to ask. But why had he killed himself that night, after meeting us, the new residents?

Was it because he saw our hope, and he knew all the shit, knew from my telling him about Cherokee that day that I was about to wander into all the Schlomo shit and God knows what else and how could he tell a bright young idealistic guy who looked up to him a lot that he'd been fucked up the ass for years by Schlomo Dove and knew that A.K. and God knows how many others had been fucked by Schlomo too? Because he was living a lie and it killed him? He was forty-one and a star, but he felt that compared to other stars he was a failure. Buy in to comparison, try to become more and more and better and better, and you can never be enough, because you can never be. I see it as clearly as this sky, as the edge of this baby's quilt upon this sand: Buy in to a self-centered way of living and you make it only up into your late thirties maybe your early forties and then your life drops down around you like pants too big for a cancered body and you're left standing there naked, and even if there's a trophy in your hand and cash in your pocket, your mouth is full of ashes.