Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

But somehow in the conference, Blair not only provoked Thorny to an enraged door-slam that measured at least eight

on the Krotkey Scale, but provoked tiny Henry Solini himself. Towering over him, pointing to Henry's earring, Blair accused him in front of everyone of being "a fag."

"You better start working on your latent homosexuality, Dr. Solini," Blair said, "because that's what's making your patient sick-your not being honest about wanting to fuck him up the ass."

"Homophobe!" Henry shouted, fists clenched. "Fascist homophobe!"

Blair paused, then smiled. "Good. Work on that gay little Latent Negative Transference of yours, will you?" He walked out, the others following. Hannah and I went to our small friend, who was trembling all over.

"C'mon, Henry," I said, "let's take a walk."

"How'd he know what Split Risk said to me, about 'up the ass'? Did you tell him, Roy?" I said no. "How'd he know that? Radar?"

"Unreal. Accusing you of that, in public."

"Yeah, but the thing is, maybe he's right. The theory, I mean."

"You, gay?"

"Latent gay? Gay-latent? Like they say-'there's a kernel of truth, in every Wheaties flake'?"

And yet Blair's assaults on Solini and me were fairly benign compared to what he did the next week in Case Conference to Hannah Silver.

Hannah was having a terrible time downstairs in BPO with D. Her patients, still devastated by Ike's suicide and its denial, taken off their antidepressants and put on God knows what, had gotten more depressed. Hannah and the staff were stretched to their limits, trying to keep suicide attempts to a minimum. Hannah was unskilled at drawing bloods for the Department of Defense study, and whenever one of her depressed patients, arms bruised the color of ripe plums, saw her approach, all hell broke loose. She insisted that Win Winthrop draw the bloods. He readily agreed, but the combination of his butcher's touch with his preacher's zeal sent Hannah's patients spinning even more quickly down that ever-constricting spiral through depression toward suicidal despair.

There was one bright spot in Hannah's world: Mary Megan

Scorato. She had mostly recovered from her blast of Placedon. Malik had called in a lawyer and written an ironclad document to prevent her from partaking in the Placedon-Zephyrill drugfest. With Malik's help, Hannah had formed a strong, empathic bond with Mary. Depression was familiar to both of them. Occasionally I'd see them together walking the grounds, and if I hadn't known them, I would not have been able to tell which was the doctor and which the patient. Their lively chatter back and forth was warm and friendly. The weekend before the conference, as a trial run before discharge, Mary Megan had gone home on an overnight. Hannah, concerned about her potential for harming herself, had had Mary phone her on Saturday and Sunday to let her know how things were going. Hannah had high hopes that the Case Conference would help Mary plan for discharge.

In the conference, Heiler, trying to mobilize the latent rage in Mary, failed miserably. No attack provoked anger. In fact, his escalating assaults brought an enshrouding silence. She sat there still as a stone. Finally Blair said, "Yeah, and I hear you were knocked up when you were seventeen."

She jumped, and then settled. Picking at the red scar on her wrist, she said, softly, "That is a private matter."

"Why?" No answer. "Why!"

Mary was silent, but her knuckles were white. She seemed paralyzed, imploded into a psychic hell. The slight smile on her face resembled the illusion of a smile you sometimes see, if the muscles clench right, on the face of a corpse.

Blair said Mary Megan could leave. With the gait of a marionette, she did.

Pissed off, Blair attacked Hannah. "Your being 'kind' to her," he said, "isn't fair to her. Don't you get it? This is a BPO with USA!"

"USA?" the BMS medical student asked in a wheezing voice.

"Unsuccessful Suicide Attempt. Because of you, Dr. Silver, that sweet lady's about to go down the tubes. You had her call you on the phone!"

Hannah looked down at her own clasped hands and nodded.

"That's the worst thing you could have done. Let's talk phone calls."

At the blackboard, Heiler wrote BORDERLINE PHONE

CALL, with stick figures of patient and therapist-SELF and OBJECT-holding tiny telephones to stick ears. "You tell your borderline to feel free to call you at home." He wrote:

A) FEEL FREE TO CALL ME AT HOME.

"When they call you at home," he went on, "you say"-and he wrote:

B) WHY ARE YOU CALLING ME AT HOME? "When they say 'Because you told me to call you,' you say":

C) YES BUT WHY ARE YOU CALLING ME? "When they say 'Because I'm upset,' you say":

D) YES BUT WHY ARE YOU CALLING ME1

"And continue," he said, "until they hang up. Not only is this getting them to take responsibility for themselves, but remember-you never know what these borderlines are doing while they're talking to you on the phone."

"What could they be doing?" the BMS student asked innocently.

"Masturbating. Talking to you, and masturbating like crazy."

The med student began wheezing uncontrollably. He reached frantically into his pockets. His face got red. Shit, I thought, we're gonna have to do mouth-to-mouth. But then he found his inhaler and, pumping it, he left.

"In short, Dr. Silver," Blair said, "you suck." He left.

Solini and I thought Hannah would be devastated, but she was calm. "He's the expert," she said. "Studies have shown that SELF psychology works. I guess I'm not getting anywhere with her, really."

"But that's crazy," I said. "If you were his patient, and you rere imspt wnulH \imi r» oii u;«~ f*-.---^rt"

vuuioi. iim, rvuy, uiai s me wnoie point. Now that I'm in analysis again I understand." Hannah had had a consultation with Schlomo Dove, who told her: "You are like the sun, giving your warmth away to others, leaving yourself cold and empty," and then hooked her right up with the perfect analyst, Dr. Ed Slapadek, rumored to be so tough that he made Blair Heiler look like the Easter Bunny. Hannah smoothed out her

dress. It was light cotton, and covered with the kinds of tiny and bright flowers that often graced Heiler's Liberty of London ties. There was new lift in the zone of her breasts, as if one of those postmodern Wonderbras was lifting flesh all the way from those hips.

"New dress, Hannah-babe?" She blushed and nodded.

"Gotta run," she said. "I've got supervision with Blair."

AFTER A FEW WEEKS of the Borderline Theory, our patients were doing their best to act like borderlines. They were all worse, much worse-cutting, slashing, smashing, bashing, and sexualizing with a celestial fury which, turned on the Heiler spindle, meant they were better. It was Borderline City.

My most difficult patient was Zoe. Continuing to binge and purge and jog in the ravaging heat, in therapy she would point out how I'd missed the point and that the real point was that I was too distant, cool, and incompetent. "I want a new therapist," she'd say to me. "I want Dr. Heiler."

The worst was one day, as I was sitting in the living room, she assaulted me in front of the other patients, screaming, "Asshole! Hey, everybody, see this guy? He's my therapist and he's an assholel"

I sat there fuming, not knowing how to respond. Then I noticed Blair Heiler, watching from the doorway. He took a first kick-step into the jungle of borderlines, and all hell broke loose. He reached his office door, turned, and said, "You poor sonsabitches," and closed the door behind him.

Later that day, with Henry and Hannah in supervision with Blair, he smiled at me and reached his elegant, long-fingered hand across his power desk to mine.

"Glad to see you're finally getting the hang of this, Roy."

"But she hates me," I said, surprised at his being so nice