Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

"Lincoln Park Zoo?" I asked, realizing that I had just felt that "click" with him, my own radar locking in. The words seemed to hang there, condensing in the crystalline puff of my

breath before dissolving in the solution of the air, easing away with all the languorous freedom of a sleepy baby's sigh.

He "clicked" back. "Sleep tight, sweetheart, and lie like hell tomorrow."

"Can I?"

"Can't not. Once y'sense the truth, kid, the false loses its grip on ya."

He picked a piece of litter off the asphalt and put it in his pocket, climbed up into the bus and rolled down the window. Leaning an arm on the sill like a friendly trucker, he offered me a Stim-U-Dent and stared down at me for a second. Nodding, he asked, "Authentic?"

"You mean my authentic self?"

"No, the opposite."

"What opposite? There is no opposite to self."

"There you go! 'Self is made up of all the non-'self' stuff."

"Like what?"

"Like, for instance, all this!" He swept his arms around the landscape, from the dark west toward the glint of sunrise in the east. "The whole damn world! Haha!"

"I'll try."

"You do better if you don't," he said, grinning, "like in sportsl"

"Pray for me in Israel, Malik, will you?" I said sarcastically.

The only sound was the hum of the argon lights, high over our heads.

"I will, Roy. None of us are here for long."

He turned the key. The old bus cleared its throat and rolled off down the hill out of Misery, and for the first time I noticed his license plate:

BREATHE

What the hell does that mean? I wondered as I stood there working the beveled edge against my gum. The stretching sensation and crisp mint taste fit the still-clear realness of my friend, freeing up from metaphor the actual autumn night, the actual strength of the sun.

Six

"LYING TO SUPERVISORS?" Henry Solini shouted.

"Learning psychiatry!" I shouted back over the loud music.

"Learning psychiatry?" he cried out.

"Lying to supervisors!"

It was the next day, after work. Solini, Hannah, and I were sitting in The Misery, a funky bar down the hill from the hospital. Henry and I were sharing a pepperoni pizza. Hannah was picking at a Greek salad without feta. Shouting over Marley's "Natty Dread," I told them what Malik had said.

Ever since Heiler had accused Henry publicly of being "gay-latent," he had gradually imploded. Like a time-lapse film of a flower packing back up into its bud, Henry had gotten compacted in on himself: shoulders more hunched, head tucked between, nose and lips and eyebrows somehow squinched down and tucked into the face, as if for protection from a rain of blows. Now he sat blinking his eyes, moving his hands slowly, like a cat its paws at the end of a long run of purring, and asked, "Telling the truth to patients?"

"Exactly."

He blinked again, and his eyebrows seemed to unfurl from the creases of his brow, his chin rifted, lifting his nose, and his eyes seemed to blossom, bright and mischievous, as if suddenly he had the idea of planting a bomb under Ideal Cleaners in Mandan, North Dakota. "Enough of this shit," he said. "We got no choice. We're getting killed, and the patients are

worse."

"Which, of course," Hannah said, "may be better." She tucked a stray lock of raven's hair back over an ear, an ear graced with a diamond earring that turned the sorry bar's light into rainbows darting here and there. Of all of us, Hannah had

been treated worst by Heiler. Her patients down in Depression were doing astonishingly badly, her marriage to Billy ben Lube was borderline violent, but Hannah was doing astonishingly well. Day after day she almost glowed. "Psychiatry," she said now, "is built on truth. There's no way I could lie to him. Those eyes. They see right through you. Like radar. Could you look him in those eyes and lie, Roy?"

I realized it would be difficult. "Maybe, maybe not."

Her own eyes rolled up to a fake Tiffany with a Clydesdale marching around it. "Even if I could he to Blair, I couldn't lie to Ed Slapadek-and they're tennis partners, so he'd tell him. You should see his eyes. He not only knows what I'm thinking now, he knows what I'll be thinking next!" Her eyes stayed up. I winked at Henry.

"It's a good thing Malik was just joking," I lied to her.

"Joking?" Hannah asked.

"Lying to supervisors? Who wouldn't think that was a joke?"

"No one," Solini said, getting my message. "No one at all."

"Truth is, Hannah," I went on, "Malik must have been using the concept of lying unconsciously, as a kind of reaction formation to show how we have to be absolutely scrupulous about telling the truth."

She pondered this. I could almost see the words clicking into place, little keys fitting little locks in the labyrinth of the Borderline Theory in her mind.

"Yes," she said weightily, "that does make sense. Besides, even a little white lie cripples me with guilt. Ed Slapadek is excellent on Jewish guilt."

" 'Guiltiness,' " Solini sang out, danced over to the jukebox, and put on the Marley song of that name. Out on the dance floor, shuffling his arms like the pistons of a steam train, his face squinching up in delight, he lip-synched the words.

Solini's new girlfriend Nique Nique came in and joined him in dancing. She was a tall, powerfully built, ebony-black Jamaican he'd met through the Misery cafeteria workers he jammed with. I felt relieved that he and I had easily lied to Hannah, but I also felt sad that she'd declared so clearly against what I now saw as the inevitable ambiguity of the merely human, and declared herself for the Heiler machine. Holding my beer, I joined the two dancers as we, white, white,

and black, transformed our chilly and insular bar into a warm, sun-filled one alive with revolution, decades back, in Trench-town, Jamaica.

AS THE CHILL of October congealed into the cold of November, as Solini and I would walk sschlwoosh! sschlwoosh! through the fallen leaves of Misery, kicking them up in puffs of snapped bright colors into the crackling sunlight, while we might have felt some fear, we felt little doubt. We had no choice. While we might not yet know what to do with our patients, we knew what not to: we would not be cruel to them. Feeling choiceless, we felt free.

Heiler was away the Test of that week at meetings of the International Dissociation Association, first in Germany doing "Borderlines on the Autobahn" and then on to Israel doing "Borderline Jews and Jewish Borderlines"-the same lecture he'd given in Germany but with the word "German" changed to "Jew" throughout-so we had a whole week of telling the truth to our patients without worrying about lying to him. It started with Thorny's untied shoelace.

Thorny had been threatening to kill me. Now, as I sat with him on Emerson, his scarred face looked particularly nasty. Even his teeth looked scary. I was on guard. He bent to tie his shoelace. Tying a shoelace is not something you think about- thinking about it makes it harder. Thorny tied his shoelace painstakingly, thinking about each loop and bow and pull. When he finished, the lace was loose and clearly wouldn't hold. Looking up, he saw me staring and he flushed.

"My parents never bothered to teach me. I learned by watchin' other kids, in gym class 'n' such. I tie 'em like I'm lookin' in a mirror… dickhead." "Want me to teach you?"

He stared at me suspiciously, wondering if this was a Heiler technique. Then he nodded. And so I taught him. Or tried to, for with him sitting across from me, mirroring me, I started trying to mirror him, which didn't work. We had to sit beside each other. Trying not to think, I made the ties and he followed. We did it over and over, making those child's rabbit ears of bows, then making them vanish, like magic. With each success we chuckled, sharing the child's sense of wonder at this tight but slippable knot. He sat back, looking with satis-