Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

THE DRUG BLACKSHIRT Win Winthrop was sitting with Solini and me a few days later in the nursing station on Emerson. Win would be rotating in to take my place with Heiler in a few days, and was telling us all about "psychiatric infomatics," some computer bullshit or other that he thought was going to make him rich.

"Outside call, Cowboy. Urgent. From a psychiatrist in Kansas."

It was a staff psychiatrist at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas.

"I believe you recently discharged a patient named Mary Megan Scorato?"

"Yes."

"She was admitted here yesterday. I'm sorry… there's bad

news." "What?" "She hung herself last night."

"What?" I cried out, feeling the same sick punch in the gut I'd felt with Ike White. The Menninger psychiatrist repeated the news. Feeling sicker, I asked a few more questions, and then said, "Wait a second. Her insurance had run out. How did she pay for admission?"

"Her son paid for it, out of his own pocket."

"Her son?" Her son was six years old and had Down syndrome. Then, suddenly, I saw it all, saw all thirty-one years of it, and a chill ran through me. "You mean the son she gave up to the nuns-put up for adoption-when she was a girl?"

"That's right. She spent the day with him here, before she was admitted. He lives just outsida Topeka. I'm sorry. She seemed like a real sweetheart."

"Yeah. She is. I mean was."

I hung up. In shock, I told Solini and Win. By the end I was crying, hard, really shaking with sobs, as was Henry. We'd kind of loved her, and we were crying for her and crying with rage, at Heiler and her Health Maintenance Organization, for murdering her. We just sat there in that ridiculous cruddy nursing station and cried.

"Really rough, Roy," Win said. "Death is so final. Can we have her brain?"

"What?"

"Her brain, for the Misery Brain Bank. Errol and I are doing a new study on brain changes in borderlines on Placedon and Zephyrill. Can you get us permission from the next of kin-I guess it's her husband?"

"Get out of here."

"It may seem insensitive but brains go to mush real fast and we have to get online and tell them how to preserve it in Kansas."

"Hey, man," Solini said, "don't you have any fucking feelings at all?"

"Exactly. Feelings have no place in the science of psychiatry."

"Go fuck yourself," I said to Win. "And get the hell out of my face."

"If you won't talk to her husband, we will."

"After what Heiler did to his wife, you think the husband would give you jerks permission to grind up her brain? Are you insane?"

"Errol's an expert in permissions for brains for the Brain Bank."

"No way, man, and fuck off."

"Errol's incredible. The toughest cases, the man brings home the bacon."

THE FUNERAL WAS held in the Scoratos' own church, the Most Holy Redeemer. A memorial service, to give those who knew her on the Misery campus a chance to say good-bye, was held hi the Misery Chapel, a small stone replica of a famous Lutheran church in the Ruhr. The chapel was packed with those whose lives Mary Megan had touched while she was at the hospital, mostly patients, some staff. I sat with Solini. Heiler had been notified in Kuala Lumpur, and was due back, but we hadn't been able to get in touch with Hannah in Florida. Music was played. Mary Megan's husband, their misshapen six-year-old son beside him beneath the cross which was hung on invisible wires from the nave like a solid gold plus sign, read a poem filled with rage, which segued into "All Things Bright and Beautiful," which my sick, numb feeling did not allow me to actually sing. Deaths echo deaths. Ike White was right there.

At the end, the husband and son rose and walked slowly up the aisle to the exit in the front, the father's hand a dead white on the son's dark suit coat shoulder. People were filing out to pay their respects to them at the door when all at once a sense flickered through the crowd that Heiler was there. Everyone turned. There he was, standing alone at the business end of the chapel, arms akimbo under the suspended cross, as if he owned it.

Then a strange thing happened. Without anyone initiating it, everyone began standing aside, opening a long aisle from the front entrance all the way back to Heiler. In silence we stared at him. He was presented with a choice, either to stand there under everyone's gaze or to walk the silent gauntlet to the front, to get out. He did the latter, those legs kicking out as if it were the most normal thing in the world to walk through a community of people who hate you and blame you for the death of someone they loved. As he walked through, the line closed in after him. Solini and I were too far back to see what happened when Heiler came to the husband and son on his

way out, but we heard a sharp curse, and then a deformed wail, before we began moving slowly forward again, to pay our respects to the survivors of this tragedy.

That afternoon Heiler called us three Emerson residents into his office for a last meeting. Hannah had just returned. Despite her tan she looked bad. Heiler, despite his tan, looked worried. Could it be? Could he be hurt by having driven Mary Megan to suicide? Seeing what I took for pain about the tragedy in his face, my heart opened to him, a little. Maybe Solini and I were wrong. Maybe in the privacy of his office he wasn't so vicious, he really was human, maybe even a good therapist. Patients did keep coming back to him, did they not? Their Mercedeses and Porsches and limousines rivaled Lloyal's own.

"You three are leaving my service tomorrow," Heiler said, "and there are things we need to talk about."

Good, I thought. At least, before we leave, we'll talk about this mess.

"You've done a fairly bad job. Solini and Basch especially have fallen off lately, discharging patients too soon. Zoe and Thorny? Paying out of pocket and you discharge them? I've never had so many empty beds. Why?"

Solini and I looked at each other in disbelief. He was upset about beds?

"You're the one who discharged Mary Megan," I said, "not us."

"Borderlines kill themselves. But you're right-it always looks bad."

It was vile. Heiler was less hurt by the death of the patient than by the insult to him. He would be seen as having failed- by his Harvard rivals, by Renaldo Krotkey. His SELF had gotten hurt. It was sickening to see, so close up, how for Heiler being a great psychiatrist was more important than helping a patient. I said, "I hear there's going to be an investigation."

"Who said thatT he asked, startled.

"It's all over Misery," Solini said. "They got the transcript of your last interview with her. We've been talking to lawyers and shit."

"With me away?"

"You were away, big fella, what did we know?"

"It wasn't just me" Heiler said, with the slightest hint of fear. "Very wise men are making these decisions."

"Who?" I asked.

"And like about what?"

Heiler got up from his desk and stood before Solini and me. He thundered down on us, "Something's fishy. What have you two been doing?"

"Did Krotkey make it to the rain forest?"

"Shut up." He stared at us. Hannah recrossed her legs. Heiler's laser eyes bored in on us. "Have you two little pricks been being 'nice' to me?"

Silence, one of: Well, You Found Us Out.

"Have you two little pricks been lying to me?"

"Go fuck yourself, Heiler!" I shouted, jumping to my feet.

"Fuck you!"

"Asshole!" Solini cried, jumping up at my elbow. "You

zygotic oaf! Up yours!"

Heiler moved closer. I saw what looked like bite marks on his neck. He stood over us, like a pile of rock. Then he nodded. "Good, good. Even if you two little dickheads did discharge them all too soon."

"ON TIME?" I cried out. "Heiler said they were discharged on

time?"

"Quite on time, as per Heiler Theory," Chief Lloyal von Nott was saying that afternoon, in that high British accent. We sat in his office in the Farben. Henry was next. It was the first time I had met with Lloyal alone. In person he seemed reptilian, his office cool, he cooler, so that I actually shivered. His blackish eyes, set as narrowly as a red setter's, were unfathomable. The lines of his skin revealed him to be older than he tried to appear. "Blair said that you and Dr. Solini had worked through the LNT so efficiently that your borderlines were discharged quite on time. Good work."