Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

"Because!"

"Why?" I shouted, losing it. "Why?"

Suddenly she quieted, looking past me, as if stunned. I turned.

Malik was in the doorway, staring at us. Looking at him, I too was stunned, and fell silent. His face was filled with sorrow. He glanced at me. I felt a rush of shame. Not that he made me feel ashamed for what I was doing. Rather, I had a sense of him taking in the scene as a whole. Not Zoe and the mental health worker and me, but, somehow, the squalor of one human being tied down like an animal in a white harsh box of a room, in pain, part of the pain being inflicted by two other human beings, untied, but just as sorrowfully caught up in the squalor. He seemed to have entered full into the scene, and yet to have stepped back from it too. In his sorrow I could see his seeing it in every particular, and yet as part of a whole world that had somehow against its natural inclination gotten perverted.

He stood there, still, for the longest time-the other Emer-sonians were standing, still, behind him-his stillness not only making this perverted piece of reality whole, but his still center like the mystery called "the eye of the storm," being a center of reality, drawing everything to it, expanding everything from it, making every everything, from the storm to the mystery, more real. Muffled screams came down from above, and up from below.

"Mind if I come in, Zoe?" he asked.

"No."

Malik came in and stood against a wall. "Mind if I sit down?" "No." He slid down the wall and perched on his heels, in that

universal posture men take when they are finally ready to talk. "Pretty rough, eh?"

Her lips trembled. Her starved eyes filmed with tears. It was that "click" I'd seen him have with people-the one I too had had with Zoe that first night on call. I realized that I'd never seen Blair Heiler have this "click" with anyone. With alarm, I realized that since that one time with Zoe, I'd never had it again. Zoe clenched her teeth and said, 'Tell them to leave."

Malik looked at me and the mental health worker. We left and walked through the clustered patients, back to the nursing station. For the first tune in a long time, there was not a sound on Emerson 2.

"ARE YOU SAYING that Blair willfully mistreats patients?" I asked Malik.

It was almost four in the morning. We sat in the nursing station. Zoe had eaten and was asleep. The hall was quiet.

" 'Course not. Heiler believes the theory-that's his problem. Deep down he feels trapped in himself, an object to others. He doesn't feel things much, so he provokes intense feeling in others, to feel a little. He never feels with. Theories about people are great, to protect you from being with people. The poor guy thinks that the way to be loved is by what he does, not who he is. The report card, not the kid bringing it home. The Nobel Prize, not how his own kids don't know him. It's classic American, it's Ike White, and man it is deadly. There's never a reason to treat patients cruelly. Never."

"What happened?" I asked, picking up on something.

Our eyes locked in. He nodded. "Good, real good." He sighed. "My first year, when I worked here with Heiler, I got into myself and Heiler big-time. He hooks people like us- competitive, high-achiever types. I was still drinking, treating people pretty bad. And then, this one patient of mine-" He choked up, closing his eyes, breathing deeply to get control. "One day in my office, I trashed her. She ran out, slammed the door. On the way back to Emerson, in the tunnels, well… she looped her belt over a pipe and hung herself."

"Oh my God."

"Yeah. Still hurts. Bad." He wiped his nose and took off his tinty glasses, squinted like a mole in the light, and wiped the tears off the lenses with the tail of his sport shirt.

"Haven't had a drink since. But it's hard to make amends to the dead. So…" He reached out and put his hand on my shoulder. It felt hot. "Your patients are worse, a lot worse. And worse is worse, not bullshit better-you know that now, right?"

Suddenly I saw it: Zoe was worse and Thorny was worse and Mary Megan was a lot worse and Cherokee and Christine were worse-worse than worse, maybe gone! — and Berry was going, and the only ones not worse were Mr. K., who was a half-pint low on frontal lobes, and Jill, who was high on temporals. "Yes, I know that."

"Sure you do."-He rubbed my shoulder, then let go his grasp. My shoulder felt warm, as if he hadn't let go. He put his amber glasses back on.

"But what can I do about it?"

"Lie to him."

"Lie to him?"

"Lying to supervisors-key concept in learning psychiatry. Listen up: You've been lying to patients and being truthful to doctors, right?" I nodded. "Reverse it. Lie to the doctors and be truthful with the patients. What a radical idea, eh?" We laughed. "And when he's off at one of these bullshit meetings, discharge like crazy."

"Into the garbage!"

"There you go. Jeez, it's late. Bronia will kill me. Tough?" His eyes rolled. "We're flying to Tel Aviv tonight, for a month." He stretched, and looked out at the living room. About a third of the patients were sitting there, wide awake. "What the hell are they doing up at this hour?" I told him about the big Department of Defense study, which caused insomnia in some Emersonians and narcolepsy in others. Malik said, "Stop the drugs. You gotta."

"I can't. The nurses give them their meds."

"Yeah, well, I betcha Mr. K.'s doin' good though, right?"

"Yeah. It's strange, but he's doing great."

"Let's go." We went to see him. He was sleeping peacefully. Malik woke him up, took out a mother-of-pearl pillbox and asked Mr. K. to take a pill. Mr. K. opened his mouth and Malik popped it in. Mr. K. swallowed it, and smiled. "Open your mouth." Mr. K. opened his mouth. Malik gestured me to look in. Nothing. "Tongue up on the roof of your mouth."

Mr. K. put his tongue up on the roof of his mouth. Nothing. "Pill." Mr. K. produced the pill. Magic. Malik asked him, "Ever try to teach that to other patients?"

"In the fifties, when the major tranquilizers came in, I taught a lot. I enjoy teaching. Shall I take it up again?"

"Talk to Dr. Basch." We walked out. "For decades he's tongued pills, avoiding every major assault of the drug docs. Get him to teach the others."

"Heidelberg West, Cowboy. The Lady Who Eats Metal Objects just swallowed the charge nurse's car keys and you gotta get her to throw 'em back up."

Our walk back up the hilly moonlit road to the Far-ben retraced our steps geographically but felt profoundly different-we were buddies once again. Malik's meticulously restored antique VW bus sat in the parking lot. Under the harsh argon its dents stood out in high relief.

"So," I said, yawning, "we tell the truth to patients, lie to Heiler, and get Mr. K. to teach everybody to tongue their meds. It's not going to be easy."

"Yeah, but because Heiler's got all different kinds of people under one roof in the name of 'borderline,' they can come together as a real team! Once they sense you're with 'em, once they're less foggy from the drugs, they'll start to play off their differences, and there's a lotta good energy in that! They'll pull together and do good. I bet you can even do LAMBS again without that jackass noticing. Talk about exciting!"

The puffs of his breath seemed alive, the words in them exciting the molecules to dance the fine edge between water and air. How excited he was, his sharp eyes blinking, his smile broad! How he loved people! I could see, in this thirty-some face, the shy thirteen-year-old Chicago kid who-locked up in math and science and isolated from his family and from girls, his only real friends being the elephants and their keepers in the Lincoln Park Zoo-had found a way to be with others as buddies and had gotten so excited about it that all these years later he was out under a full moon just before dawn in a forlorn parking lot of a mental hospital hopping up and down like a lunatic.