Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

Blair Heiler had come out of Emerson and was walking up the road to Misery Daily Report. He glanced at us. He was well out of earshot, but I stopped talking, as if he too had borderline radar. His gait was peculiar. As if contact with the ground stopped at his belly, each leg shot out of its own blind will, each step pivoting his hip seductively. The walk of a stick figure.

As he disappeared over the rise in the road, Hannah said: "Look, Roy, I kind of agree with you. While it was going on, I was appalled. But then, when he explained it, it was incredibly brilliant. I mean he really woke Zoe up-she was acting really real-wasn't she?" "You understood it?"

"No, it's way too complicated to be understood by beginners, people who don't really understand. Malik's a sweetheart, but what's his theory? If he has one, it's kind of fuzzy and…" She fell silent, drifting off.

Standing there in the moment's sun, the slight breeze stirring the fresh chlorophyll scent up from the lawn clippings, I saw what she meant. Heiler had gotten to Zoe, flipped her into a hyper-real rage. He'd been able to justify everything he'd done. The theory rang true. "Henry," I said, "what do you think?"

Solini thought. He thought so hard he gave the impression of having lost his train of thought. He tugged his earring; his brow furrowed like a basset's. Henry too had flourished under Malik, finding a support group of Jamaicans in Dietary, jamming with them in the music room of the Recreation Building. "Malik was cool," he said, "but for the next few months we're like three white mice, man, running the Heiler maze. Maybe we gotta just chill?"

"How can it be right to treat a person like that?" My question hung there without answer, like a dead branch of a tree, caught in other, live branches. Like the ghost of Dee White.

"Got to go," Hannah said. Smoothing her skirt over her thighs, she did something she'd never yet done in her two months of psychiatric training.

"Solini, look," I cried out. "A smile."

"Holy shit. Far out, Hannah-babe. Go for it."

Hannah smiled more, in embarrassment. "But the thing is…" She trailed off again, an index finger caressing a corner of her smile.

Solini and I waited. No luck. "What, Hannah?" I asked. "What?"

"Oh." She seemed surprised that we were still there. Blushing, she said, "It's just that he's so brilliant and… and God is he handsome."

HANDSOME HE WAS, and as is often the case with great Americans, his handsomeness solidified his power.

From that morning on, the Emersons changed. With Malik there'd been a sense of all of us-residents, nurses, social workers, MHWs-working with the patients, walking a path beside them at their pace, trying to match their gait. But Zoe's door slam was like the starting gun of a fierce race with no clear course and no clear finish, everyone for him-or-her-SELF. From that day on the patients started to turn against us. It was what Blair had drawn on the board: SELF versus OBJECT, with a wall in between.

That first day set the tone and the pattern: Blair would do his "Insurance Rounds," crunch a patient or two on the way out, and spend the day in his office in Farben. There he would see his private patients, many of whom were exquisite and sexy BPOs with HF (Hysterical Features) from Misery's wealthiest families. He would supervise his research lab and tend to the banks of computers that were crunching up complex and confusing raw data from the Emerson patients, spewing out intricate permutations of the Krotkey Factors, encoding the spew into diagnoses of "BPO with (LMNOP)," and wadding the encoded spew into an even more complex and confusing Borderline Theory for publication. With Blair gone from Emerson, the crunched-up patient would try to crunch up the staff.

Blair moved swiftly to take over Emerson 3, Psychosis, rediagnosing almost everyone as BPO with P (Psychosis); and Emerson 1, Depression, rediagnosing almost everyone as BPO with D (Depression). The small sign on the doorpost of

Emerson 2-"Borderline Ward"-came down. A big sign went up over the main entrance to all three Emersons:

BORDERLINE HOUSE

He took most patients off their antipsychotic or antidepressant drugs, and with Errol and Win began the two-million-dollar Department of Defense drug study. At random, without any of us knowing which patient was being put on what drug, most Emersonians were put on Placedon or Zephyrill or placebo, and except for Henry and Hannah and me, never spoke to a doctor in person again. Abandoned by their doctors, they were left with feelings of abandonment. This, Blair said, was nothing but our old Krotkey friend the LNT, Latent Negative Transference.

Heiler couldn't have been happier. Day after day he would unlock the massive hall door at nine sharp, wearing yet another from his collection of stylish summer suits and ties with tiny and bright flowers, graced by what seemed yet another alluring cologne. Closing the door behind him gently, he would turn and face the Emersonians. They, knowing that this would be their only chance to try to talk to the guy controlling every aspect of their fate, would eye him fiercely, as if they'd Like to kill him and eat him. It was a moment of incredibly high voltage. Blair would look down at them from his safe height and smile sardonically, shaking his head in disttiay at their plight. This provoked more rage. As his stick-figure legs kicked out machinelike from his hips, carrying him through the clawing underlings with the imperturbability of a shooting star through empty space, they would try to get through to him, asking for privileges, begging for a personal meeting with him, demanding discharge or transfer to another unit.

Before disappearing into his office for insurance rounds, he would turn and face the snarling patients. There would be a hush. Then Blair would smile, shake his head with disgust and contempt, say loudly, "These darn borderlines," and close his door quietly. The place would go bananas.

The Emerson staff too would try to corner Blair on these stick-figure drive-bys, trying to make him understand that the

atmosphere on the unit was so bad that no one was getting better but in fact everyone was getting a lot worse.

"Good," Blair would say, moving away. "Good work."

"But they all hate us," said Vijay, a Pakistani mental health worker.

"Great," Blair said. "That's just great."

"They think we're all assholes," the head nurse said.

"Assholes?" Blair said pensively. "Assholes?" He considered this. Nodding his head sagely, he said, "Yeah, they're right. You are."

This would infuriate the staff further. I soon realized that this was perfectly in line with his being an orthodox Krotkeyian: Focusing his attention on his SELF, but for a tiny sector for every other person as an OBJECT, was the theoretically correct technique for infuriating. Expertly, in the name of EMPATHY, he treated us as OBJECTS.

Zoe, enraged at me, kept pointing out my incompetence. Her bulimia blossomed, her weight plummeted. She conceived a passion for thinness. I was appalled by this, and stuck to my Malik routine, sitting in his chair out in the living room for rounds, available to anyone who wanted to talk to me, trying to keep on being human. This seemed to make my patients even more enraged. Rather than talk to me, they shouted at me. The LAMBS died. I didn't know what to do.

Solini and Hannah were having just as bad a time as I was. The next Case Conference, Solini presented his therapy patient Thorny. Since my night on call when I had screamed back at him, Thorny had been doing better. Coming from Cajun country, Thorny was a fan of zydeco music, which was close enough to Solini's reggae for them to form a bond, if not a band. Henry and his nascent band of Jamaicans would sometimes allow Thorny to join them on drums. Thorny had been sent to Misery because of his uncontrollable temper. Under the influence of alcohol or other drugs, he would pick fights in bars with men who were bigger and tougher than he, leaving a record of scars, which had finally made his father, as legal guardian, commit him to Misery. I'd been in touch with his father-the "Burn King of the Bayous"-and we were on the verge of discharging Thorny to a halfway house nearby.