Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

"I'm totally stressed out!" she cried. "Why won't you give me Valium?"

"You smoke pot and drink every day, and you think I' d give you Valium?"

"I smoke dope because you won't! Why?"

"Why yourself?"

"I just asked you that. What's wrong with you today?" Suddenly she smiled coyly. "I've started dating Dr. Arnold Bozer. Your colleague?"

Arnie Bozer was the optimistic blockhead from the wooden Midwest who'd asked me for Christine's name and number. Just that afternoon in Resident Support Group, Arnie had announced, excitedly, "I've started my psychoanalysis with Dr. Schlomo Dove. I went to his home office for the first time this morning and lay down on his couch. Holy moley, you shoulda heard my first associations!"

None of us asked to hear Arnie's associations.

At the end of the Resident Support Group, Arnie had taken me by the elbow, like a guy trying to sell you a chicken or something, and said, "Roy, I just wanted to tell you you're doing a great job with your patient Chrissy."

"How do you know that, Arnie?"

"I'm dating her. A really nice gal."

Now Christine was stroking the outside of her thigh with an index finger whose nail was the dark shade of venous blood. "Arnie and I made love last night for the first time.

Fanwntastic. I'm used to guys who just want to fuck, but he kisses great. Said he wanted to make love with me, not to me."

She stared, challenging me. I felt that radar, scanning my weak spots. Classic borderline. Tightly, I said, "So what did you do?"

"Do?"

"Sexually." She smiled. I blushed.

"You're blushing!"

"Am not." A bead of sweat slid down my forehead into my eyes.

"Think I don't know that you're attracted to me? That first day, the sexual vibes in the air?" I said nothing, sensing now the fierce hunger of the borderline. "Can't you say anything! You're acting so weird today. Why?"

Okay. It's every man for himself. I'm not sick, she is. Be firm. With a cut of Heiler anger, I said, "Why are you always trying to manipulate me?"

"Me manipulate you! Jesus Christ!" She uncrossed her legs. "I'm leaving." She got up, went to the door, and grasped the doorknob. "And this time I won't be back. I'll get what I need from Arnie. He has potential. You don't. Your heart is a block of ice." She turned quickly and opened the inner door and marched out. Or tried to, for she forgot that there was an outer door too, to soundproof us from the Bozers in the hallways. She bashed her face into it, and cried out in pain. She put her hand to her nose, checked her fingers for blood, and found it. "Terrific-a bloody nose. And still no Kleenex!" She stormed out, slamming the door behind her, about a three on the Heiler scale.

Should I chase her? No. She's not ruining my Tuesday night, hell no.

My night was hellish nonetheless, in all the ways that humans can be hellish around their health. It's nerve-racking to be alone in charge of a mammoth mental hospital at night, all the while sensing that something is deeply amiss in nature and not quite knowing what. For several hours Viv had me running all over the place tending to emergencies, doing admissions, and answering phone calls from anyone on the planet who, as they sensed in their bones the sinister darkness of autumn and saw with more fear than romance the full moon rise, heard the murmur of mental illness and dialed toll-free to

Misery. Finally, some godless hour long after midnight, as I was walking through the parking lot outside of the Farben, Viv beeped me:

"Emerson-Two, Cowboy. Zoe pulled out her feedin'tube." Zoe was in bad shape. Blair Heiler had restricted her from jogging. In retaliation, Zoe had cut herself and tried to throw herself through the plate-glass window between the living room and the nursing station. Without telling her, Blair replaced the glass with Plexiglas so that the next time Zoe jumped into what she thought was glass, she just bounced, much to his satisfaction. From that humiliating bounce on, Zoe had refused food entirely. Blair had force-fed her through a feeding tube. Her weight had plummeted to seventy-three pounds. Her electrolytes were so screwed up that she was dazed and vomiting and in danger of kidney and liver failure and death. I still felt a special link to Zoe-my first inpatient- and was scared for her. I'd urged Blair to transfer her out to a medical hospital. He had refused, and laid down the law: force-feedings by feeding tube. Now, for Zoe to miss even one feeding might be catastrophic. The tube had to stay in.

Reluctantly I turned around, and slowly, heavily, feeling really pissed off at the huge effort that replacing her feeding tube would require, I started walking back through the woods toward Emerson.

"Tough night?" said a voice at my elbow. I turned. L. A. Malik, in white short-sleeve sport shirt and khaki pants, munching soy nuts. He looked fit and tan. His tone was concerned.

"What are you doing here?" I asked.

"Hung around to talk to the guys, after the AA meeting." It was almost two. The meeting ended at nine.

"That's a long hang-around."

"Not when you're with your buddies." He was not smiling. The only time I had seen him since being with Heiler was a few weeks before, when he and I had played tennis. I was the better tennis player, but his persistent, energetic style pissed me off, and somehow he beat me in straight sets. Afterward he'd been somber, even distant, and had started to just walk away.

"Wait. You're not gonna ask me how things are going with Heiler?" I'd asked.

"Don't have to. See you around."

"What do you mean?"

"Y'can tell everything about a guy," he'd said, "by how he plays a span"

"Gotta go," I said now. He asked if he could come with. I said okay.

We walked down the winding road, several arms' lengths apart and in an awkward silence, our cartoon puffs of breath empty, past the handsome nineteenth-century brick buildings, mostly quiet and dark, around the head of the lake, which was calm and yet, in its moonlit, quicksilvered dark, ominous. As we came over the last hill toward Emerson, the sheer surface of the night was broken, first by screams, and then, as we turned the last corner at the edge of the lake, by light, for many windows were still lit up. In the chill autumn moonlight the new brass plaque over the lintel gleamed: BORDERLINE HOUSE.

As we climbed up through the wooden-railed stairwell, the enveloping shouts and screams made it feel like we were in the warp of a nightmare. We stopped on the landing of Emerson 2. Sounds of shouting, angry people surrounded us, slipping out under the door, raining down from Psychosis above, blasting up from Depression below. The Split Risk sign, previously a temporary thing made of cardboard and stuck to the door with tape, was now a small brass plaque screwed in. Carefully I unlocked the door. The living room was packed with my patients, pacing, growling, shouting, threatening.

"And now, folks, the Dickhead of the Decade, Doctor Roy G___"

Silence, one of, Could It Be?

"Dr. Malik, I presume?" Mr. K. asked.

"Malik!" Thorny cried. "Hot damn!"

As the patients flocked around him, I walked to the Quiet Room. A pathetic sight. Zoe was faceup on the mattress, tied down in four-point restraints, moaning. She was so emaciated, barely hidden by a loose tank top with a picture of Snoopy, that I could see, as if on X ray, the clavicle, acromion, the coracoid process. The fatty breast tissue had been mostly re-absorbed, an attempt by the body to find sustenance.

All at once I felt immense fatigue. I was tired of dealing

with all the shit of the night, and angry and disgusted at having to put a new feeding tube down.

"Sorry, Zoe, but I have to put a feeding tube down."

"No!" she cried. The struggle began. The mental health worker held her head still; I put Lubafax on the green tube and put it into her nose. A feeding tube is easy if the patient will swallow it down; if not, it's hell. The tube popped back out. I put it in. Out. In. Amazing, her strength. Out. "You can control yourself, you can eat-why won't you?"