Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

"Maybe, Roy-babe, the problem is you expect too much, and have to settle for less, and I expect too little, and have to settle for more?"

"So why the hell are you doing this, Henry?"

"Because it beats dry cleaning?"

Hannah took out a bottle of pills, extracted two and gulped

them down. I asked what they were. "Zoloft. I've never been

so depressed in my life." "Does it help?" I asked.

"It's cosmetic," she said. "I'm putting all my patients on it too."

"What?" Henry said. "You're putting all of them on Zoloft?" "Why not? They're all more depressed now, having me as their psychiatrist"

Arnie Bozer, the resident who'd seen Christine run out of my office, walked up. His bald head, full-moon face, chipmunk cheeks, and plump lips made him look well scrubbed. Arnie was a chipper fellow from the wooden Midwest, a young man who didn't seem to know the meaning of the word "unhappy," and who for all you knew might just be an ax murderer underneath. "I'd love to join you, guys, but I'm power-lunching with our chief. Jeez, Roy, I overheard the end of your session with Christine. God, you were in a tight spot, with her demanding that you disclose your personal feelings to her."

"You were eavesdropping?" I asked. Then, remembering I still hadn't heard anything from her, I felt a jolt of fear.

"You didn't close the inner door. I myself have a policy on personal disclosure: I tell my patients everything I'll allow them to know about me right away before they say anything. Then, that's it. I tell them that I will never tell them anything personal ever again. That's my policy."

"How can you have a policy, man," Henry asked, "when you haven't really had any patients yet?"

"Policy is my area of expertise. I'll be doing my third year at business school-the B.B.S. But that Christine is neat. Maybe I'll call her."

'To be your patient?" I asked.

"Gosh no. I'm a stranger in this neck of the woods. I'm from Indiana. Same state as her." "You want to date her?" I asked.

He nodded, and blushed. He actually blushed, a dull pink bulb.

"Arnie, that's unethical!"

"Thanks for sharing," he said, and, whistling "Dream the Impossible Dream," he left.

Hannah was playing with her food, the lo-cal option, the

Misery Catch of the Day. "I'm so depressed. I still can't believe Dee killed himself. And Mary Megan slit her wrist? I love that woman! It's like suicide's in the air, like it's contagious. I keep having the fantasy I'm going to a funeral tomorrow."

"Whose funeral, girl?" "Mine."

Henry and I looked at each other. "But you don't seem that bad, Hannah-babe," Henry said. "Look at me funny, I'll start to cry. Do you know what it's like to be working on Emerson One now? A whole ward of severely depressed patients? And who was their hero, their only hope for living a normal life?" I knew who their hero was, but I asked anyway. "Ike White. It got so bad last night I called up my old analyst." She rolled her eyes up to the recessed lighting and said, "He said my problem is that I'm not being self-centered enough. 'Narcissism is good,' he said, 'a good good thing.' He's in L.A. now, head of the IHN." And what was the IHN?

"The Institute for Healthy Narcissism. He was great: in twenty minutes he drilled out the unconscious forces under my depression."

"Sounds like a visit to the dentist," I said. Hannah stopped chewing her fish. "Isn't your father a dentist?"

"Retired. So?"

"So you need a psychoanalysis, to work through your feelings about your father, your attitude toward authority figures." "You mean my mother?" "Your mother?" "The authority figure." "The authority figure?" "Is there an echo in here?" "What about your mother as authority figure, Roy?" "Could someone as wonderful as me," I said sarcastically, "have a good mother, Hannah?"

"See? Work it through, or you'll act it out. Your unconscious is coiled down there-like mine, like Henry's-just waiting to attack! My only hope is that Zoloft keeps me afloat till after Labor Day, when Schlomo gets back and finds me

just the right new analyst-and that there aren't any more disasters with my patients. I can't take another disaster with any of my patients."

ANOTHER DISASTER WITH one of her patients, in fact her favorite patient, Mary Megan Scorato, was awaiting her fifteen minutes later on Emerson 2. As the three of us walked in, Mary Megan was pacing back and forth in little shuffling steps like a robot, the budding twitchiness I'd noticed the previous night now blossoming into whole-body convulsions and tongue-flappings and slappings and-as if in mockery of Hannah's own eyes-eye-rolls up and down and around and even seemingly over, like egg yolks frantic to escape beating. Her white-bandaged wrist twitching up and down made her look as if she was directing traffic, or practicing samurai chops, or waving like Miss America in a convertible. Periodically she shouted out:

"ACCEPT! REJECT! WAITLIST!" Hannah's own eyes got big as yolks and her mouth fell open and I thought she was going to die. What we were seeing was something called TD, Tardive dyskinesia, a side effect of drugs. But what drug? Malik had written in the chart that Mary Megan refused all drugs. Hannah began trailing Mary Megan up and down the ward, trying to get her to talk to her, but all Mary would say was "ACCEPT! REJECT! WATT LIST!" On one pass I asked Hannah if she'd put Mary Megan on any drugs. It turned out that yesterday Win Winthrop, Errol's slave, had convinced Hannah to try Mary Megan on their experimental drug, Placedon. He said this new wonder drug would cure her depression and that it had no known side effects, none whatsoever, whatsoever.

"But I broke the pill in half," Hannah said pleadingly. "And I broke that half in half. I gave a tiny dose!" She hurried off after Mary Megan.

"Unbelievable," I said to Henry, "a quarter dose, full-blown Tardive. That experimental Thai shit is murder."

Malik arrived, sized up the situation and got some Cogentin, which sometimes worked to relieve the symptoms of Tardive.

"She'll never take another drug," Hannah said. "I killed her!"

"People are pretty resilient," Malik said. "Let's check it out.

Sit."

We sat together in the living room watching Mary pace and twitch and shout and flap her tongue like a frog. While it was bad enough that this sweet sad woman had been turned into a kind of amphibian, it turned out that Hannah had neglected to get her to sign the informed consent to be in Win and Errol's experiment and get the Placedon, and if she didn't snap out of it, everybody involved would get sued to hell, Malik talked about Tardive, about how in the fifties when the major tran-quilizers came in, they were tested for a few years and then used on everybody, and how, as time went on-more time than they were tested for-it turned out that these drugs produced horrific side effects, this tongue-snapping frog-shit called Tardive.

'Tardive's a disease caused by treatment, but there's no treatment for Tardive!" he said. "And just you watch: if they find a cure for the second disease they caused by their failed cure of the first disease, it'll be a worse disease! All these new drugs-it's like the Drug of the Month Club, for Chrissakes- are only tested for a few years. The lifetime of a lab rat is only three years. For all we know, Prozac and Zoloft, five years down the road, are gonna turn people into lizards! All these nice housewives and teachers and bus drivers and pilots turning into lizards? Prozacians? Zolofters! It's sick!" "ACCEPT! REJECT! WAITLIST!" Mary Megan was standing before us twitching and snapping and snorting, quite h'zardUke, a Placedonian, why not? But she was listening.

"If you take this pill, this Cogentin, you'll stop twitching," Malik said. "REJECT!"

"Okay," Malik said. "But are you hearing voices, Mary?" "ACCEPT!"