Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

"Have you asked her about this?"

"I've got no solid evidence. I ask her what goes on in therapy, but she says that Dr. Dove says it's confidential."

"But it's driving you crazy. You might just-"

"You think I'm crazy?"

There was a hint of crazy in this, given the reality of Schlomo, but just a hint. "No, no, you are not crazy."

"Oh. Good. You believe that he's… you know, screwing her in therapy?"

"I believe that you believe it."

"I don't, totally, I mean. But you say I'm not crazy?"

"Suspicious yes, crazy no."

"Not even, maybe… I don't know… a little paranoid?"

"Have you ever seen Dr. Dove?"

"No, why?"

"Look," I said, "you don't know the truth. You've got nothing to go on."

"And it's driving me crazy! Do I need hospitalization?"

"No."

"Can I come talk to you?"

"To start therapy?"

He grimaced, as if I'd just suggested we try a few root canals. "I wish you wouldn't call it that. Father-none of my people-believe in psychiatry. 'Stand tall,' they always say, if there's any trouble, 'stand tall, and call your lawyer.' Therapy's for… others."

'Too 'messy,' eh?"

He blinked, as if in strong light. He sighed. "You got me. Shit."

"I'd be glad to see you."

He paused. I felt him struggle with it. Then he loosened his tie and through gritted teeth said, "Fuck 'em. Let's make an appointment."

We set up an appointment for the next week. He stood, crunched my hand, and walked out as gracefully as, well, as a horse. I liked him and felt for him, and if I could get him to come to therapy, I could help him. Schlomo? Do I tell him about this? Better talk to my supervisor, Ike White, first.

My on-call night was over. I walked over to the administration building, the Farben, handed in my beeper, and walked on past the grand front stairway with its rosewood banister that curled up overhead to the right and left. On the landing two antique Chinese vases filled with silk flowers framed a landscape painting of fields and cows and a proud, lone tree. My feet sank into the carpet as if I were in slippers. As I opened the front door and went from air-conditioning to reality, the damp heat hit me like the fat palm of a Turkish masseur slapping me around in a steam bath in Istanbul. Squinting in the russet morning, I stood on the front steps, perched on the crest of a high hill overlooking the city. Feet on granite, head between soaring pillars, I felt like I was standing in the doorway of a bank.

Mount Misery was the name of this hill, and of the hospital built upon it The hill had been christened first, in the early eighteenth century, by a band of hardy Puritan farmers tormented by the nor'casters that would whip the rough rock for

four days at a time. The hospital had been founded later, in 1812, by a group of civic-minded Yankees who, having built a hospital in the city to treat diseases of the body, decided they wanted a matching set, and built one far out in the countryside, in the shadow of the mountains, for diseases of the mind. Their keeping the name Misery showed a measure of obvious delight, that perverse delight which comes with ironic resignation. By the late nineteenth century there were many of these elegant farmlike mental institutions, some of which still survive: Austin Riggs, McLean, the Brattleboro Retreat, Shepard Pratt, and Chestnut Lodge. The principle in the construction of asylums was denial: "Out of mind, out of sight." Misery had been protected from suburban sprawl by its natural boundaries: the high hill, several ominous ravines, and the swamp at the end of the lake. Its dozen or so separate buildings were surrounded by eighty acres of fields, woods, and streams, all rimmed by a high, iron-spiked fence.

Mount Misery soon became a teaching hospital affiliated with what was nicknamed "the BMS" — the "Best Medical School" in the world. Throughout its history Misery had been in the forefront of the latest red-hot treatment for mental illness. At first this consisted of shackles, purges, bleedings, and teaching proper table manners. Now Misery offered all the different treatments of late-twentieth-century psychiatry. Traditionally it had been the hospital of the unstable wealthy — it was at one time fashionable to be able to announce that one had "a son at Harvard, a father buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery, and a mad cousin in Misery." These days it attracted not only the wealthy, but also the insured. While welfare cases were rare, each of us new first-year residents in psychiatry would spend some time at Candlewood State Hospital, the state facility down the hill and across the swamp. At Misery there were artists, poets, folk singers, writers, and a steady stream of those tender young men and women cracked by the most ruthlessly prestigious colleges in America. Creative, interesting people who, it was said, made "great cases." The unofficial hospital motto was, "There's Sanity in Misery."

It was almost the end of July. The morning was already hot and humid, the dawn cool seeping out under the night's umbrella in smaller and smaller droplets, heating up, sizzling off, gone. To the north, mountains cooled their peaks with

clouds. Before me, lining the roads and coalescing in peaceful woods, were oaks, maples, and, with their clusters of lilylike flowers, catalpas. To my right was the red-brick colonial of Toshiba, the Admissions Unit, with the windowless research wing sticking out of it just above ground level like a stainless steel prosthetic foot. High up on the hill to my left above a ravine nicknamed "Loopy Lovers Leap," peeking out from a clearing in the pine forest like eyes from a hiding place in a scary fairy tale, were the twin spiked towers of the two buildings named the Heidelbergs-replicas of the famous Bridge Towers that were the gateway to the real Heidelberg, "Birthplace of German Romanticism." Heidelberg West was the Misery Center for Psychopharmacology, the drug treatment of mental illness. Heidelberg East, just across the ravine, was Alcohol and Drug Recovery. An incessant, busy stream rushed down from the ravine, pooled in the sausage-shaped lake, and oozed off to swampy stuff where, amidst the cattails and skunk cabbage and forlorn willows, was the squat ivy-covered building that housed Schlomo's Outpatient Clinic. Farther down the hill, alongside the road leading to the wrought-iron gate and granite gatehouse, across the broad swath of the orphaned eighth fairway of the once-grand Misery Links, rose the towering Greek Revival structure of Thoreau, the Freudian Family Unit, its bubble skylight a cyclops eye staring back in transcendental defiance past me, up at the spiked, certain, drug-centered Heidelbergs. Far to my left, past the lake and out of sight in the deep woods, was Emerson, my current home base, which housed Depression, Borderline, and Psychosis, one on each of its three floors. Here and there on the lush green lawns an immense copper beech spread its branches like a hoop skirt sequined with metal.

I took off my suit jacket, turned left, and wandered along the narrow, twisting, and hilly main road that skirted the lake and crossed the stream on a narrow stone bridge. The ivied buildings could have been a college campus. What could have been students strolled peacefully along, none looking like patients. I had yet to learn how to tell the patients from the staff on sight.

I was one of five first-year residents in a three-year training program to become psychiatrists. This, our first year, was tightly structured. Every eight weeks or so we would move

from one rotation to another, on a computer-generated schedule that we had been handed on our first day in Misery. Each of these Misery rotations was to teach us how to treat inpa-tients, those poor souls locked up in the various wards. Each rotation was with a group of patients with a particular diagnosis, each group housed in a different building-depressives on the first floor of Emerson, borderlines on Emerson 2, drug addicts on Heidelberg East, and so on. Each of the first-year residents did the exact same rotations, in different order, every couple of months moving on in a kind of equal-opportunity psychiatric musical chairs, with exactly enough chairs for all. I was a month into my first rotation, on Emerson. Next I would move to Toshiba, then to Thoreau, and, for the final part of the first year, to each of the Heidelbergs. In addition, all year long each of us was assigned to a different Outpatient Clinic Team, and would follow our very own patients as outpatients-not admitted to the hospital-in psychotherapy throughout the course of the year. And of course each of us first-year residents would be on call every fourth night, as the DOC-the Doctor on Call-the only doctor available to the 350 inpatients all night long.