Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

"You shouldn't cut yourself, you know," I said, feeling parental-she was, after all, someone's child. She didn't answer. I wrapped the soft, clean gauze around the prickly row of sutures, and did it carefully, thinking that the quality of my touch might determine something. "Didn't it hurt?"

"It hurt more t-t'feel d-d-dead," she said, twitching. "D-D-Dr. White d-d-dead."

"Yeah," I said, "he screwed us all." She stared, and twitched, in silence.

Jill and I sat in the muggy nursing station, at opposite ends of the large table piled with charts and styrofoam cups and Burger King wrappers and cans of Diet Pepsi and a woman's yellow tank top. I pictured us as husband and wife, dining in. "Well, darling, shall we ring for the help, to clear?"

She smiled, and reddened. "I blush easy," she said. "Look, I feel really bad-it's my fault-I was a few minutes late, on checks."

"I'm sure you did your best." Her blouse was wet with blood. Bumpy lace lay underneath. I was desperate to quit this on-call shit and touch her.

"What if that's not good enough?"

"My mother always told me," I said, wondering Why the hell am I bringing her into this now? "that if you do your best you can't be wrong."

"And my mother always told me to do what my father said-and, to watch out for men. Which, if you think about it, is pretty screwed up." My beeper. Viv's voice:

"Hate to do this, Cowboy. You got med trouble on Heidelberg West."

I groaned, got up, took her hand. The palm was rough. "Manual labor?"

"Horses. My passion."

"Lucky horses."

The thunder crunched and blasted above and the rain finally

came. Being there with her was a comfort; we were fellow night warriors in Misery. I said good night Thorny, standing in front of the door, said to me contritely:

"Wish I knew, Doc."

"Knew what?"

"What you asked-what's wrong with me. That I keep calling you a dickhead? Maybe has to do with my daddy polluting half of Louisiana and a lot of the Gulf-talk about a dickhead! Y'all can see how a successful guy like you, to me, well, I reckon you'd be a dickhead too?"

Amazed at actually having this talk, I said, "Sure, but I've

got to-"

"I started askin' myself: How am / poisonin' things? And how're things poisonin' me? Man, you start askin' those questions, you see there ain't much out there that's not poisonin' the world. We're all dickheads, dickin' around with the planet. At Princeton, I did my first term paper on this shit, and got an F-'Off the subject,' the prof said. So I dropped out. Just when you was startin' to excel at ol' Harvard, right, Doc?"

"I'd like to talk now, but I've got an emergency. Tomorrow, we'll talk-"

"Damn! Wish I had a damn emergency somewhere. Or even somethin' to do."

"Volunteer. Get privileges, work for Greenpeace. We'll talk, okay?"

We shook hands on it, like real men, even like fresh new frosh in crisply fall Cambridge at the Princeton-Harvard game when, in football weather, you'd flow down from the Square across the bridge toward the stadium with a girl on your arm and a flask in your pocket and the world at your feet. I walked to the door, feeling good about him.

"Dickheads Take the Bait!"

I turned and stared at him in disbelief. He winked. I left.

The skies had cracked, and up there the lightning was dancing and the thunder was banging big kettledrums and with a whoosh the sulfurous cool air was sweeping up and was met by lowering curtains of rain, with fiery streaks of hail that popped off the roofs of the cars like oil off hot skillets. The hair on the back of my neck stood on end with the static electricity, and my drenched and bloodied shirt felt clammy, making me shiver. I had to get way up the ravine through the

woods above the Farben to the Heidelbergs. To avoid getting drenched, I took to the tunnels.

I'd heard about the tunnels, a labyrinth under Mount Misery connecting all the buildings. Moving toward the Heidelbergs, the first stretch was long and twisting and going up and down like a roller coaster, badly lit and damp and smelling of sewage, the next section straight as a railroad and lit with the latest fluorescence and with that glorious scent of freshly fluffed laundry. Sometimes where bulbs were burnt out I would miss the signs telling me where I was, so that I lost my way, and found myself heading up toward a crest in a dark, scary aboveground stretch, the rain pouring in through a window, the thunder making it hard to concentrate on which way to go. Then, from over the crest ahead, I heard, of all things, a reggae band. Solini?

No Solini. Something Solini had told me about. A crazy black man who'd shown up the night before when Henry was on call, and who'd formed a psychotic attachment to Solini on the basis of their shared interest in reggae. The guy had no insurance, and Henry hadn't the heart to turf him to Candle-wood State, so he gave him a map of the Misery underground. There he lay, on a piece of cardboard imprinted with "ogress Is Our Most Impo." From a small tape deck came some Bob Marley, but soft and fuzzy, as if Bob and the Waiters were lying exhausted and hungry on their own "ogress" cardboards in their own tunnels somewhere else. He stared at me, his face scarred and pocked, the hard gravel roadbed of the poor.

"Solini?" he mumbled, struggling up on one elbow, smelling of stale wine.

"No, no-no Solini," I answered, "go back to sleep."

On Heidelberg West, the Drug Unit, I patched up a drug mess that Win Winthrop had made. Back in Toshiba, while writing up Zoe, I took a few calls-"Storm calls, Cowboy"- and it was true-the storm had people under beds and in closets thinking cancer and AIDS and downsizing and gerbils.

As the sun came up, I found myself copying over, into the chart, a part of Zoe's suicide note:

They say I've got everything but it's all plastered on my life like a smile on my face and inside I'm dying. Maybe, Mom, if you gave my diaries to some mental institute

they could find what I couldn't and help someone else. People don't leave notes because it's hard enough to do it without making it so definite and thought-out-that's why I slept with the light on sometimes Mom, it wasn't like I was really going to sleep.

Strange, I thought, for me to write out these words calmly, words written in torment a few hours before. Same hand motion, same words, but now, words only. How light words seemed, riding the fire underneath. Ike had left no note. Suddenly I felt pissed. The fucker! He was a fucking expert in this, he knew the pain he was going to cause!

All at once I felt so alive! With Malik, with Zoe and Mary Megan and Thorny, there had been flickers of understanding, yes! I walked out into the fresh wet morning feeling powerful.

IT DIDN'T LAST. Exhaustion came down on me like solid thunder. The day was a blur, filled with fuzz.

I remember sitting with Solini and Hannah at lunch, staring dully at the way the mental health workers, nurses, social workers, psychologists, and Buildings and Grounds all intermixed with each other for lunch, yet the psychiatrists mixed with no one but other psychiatrists. They all sat together at two central tables, and as in a film, a black-and-white art film entitled "How Shrinks Eat," they moved like wind-up toys in dark suits and white shirts: fork-to-food, food-to-mouth, fork-to-food, food-to-mouth, fork-to…

Solini had been called in that morning by Lloyal von Nott and raked over the coals for his "looseness" on his admitting night. Now Henry said, "Y'know, when they accepted me here, I thought I was fooling them, by getting in? But now I know that they knew I thought I was fooling them, by getting in, and so they fooled me, by letting me in."

"I know," I said. "It's infuriating, the way there's so much crap and then, once in a while-like last night with Zoe-you really help somebody."