Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

"Gay-latent!" he said, kissing me back. "Cool!" Tipsy on rum and pineapple juice in the way that it sneaks up on you in the shade, we drove through the late-November rain toward Mount Misery. Solini, wearing his rainbow woolen Rasta cap, was hunched over the steering wheel peering out at the wavering roadway. Nique Nique was in

the passenger seat, a warm scent of jasmine. Jill and 1 v» eie scrunched up in back.

We parked at Emerson. A misty rain was fairing, the kind you can't help but like. Henry and I stood side by side peeing on the front lawn, humming "Borderline." I kicked at a soggy clump of brown leaves, raising the scent of earth, the image of healthy decay that would fuel the distant spring. We stared at the big brick building. Over the lintel was a new sign:

DISSOCIATIVE HOUSE

With insurance now paying more for dissociative than borderline, Heiler was changing most of the diagnoses. Looking back, historians would be astonished at this shift of mental illness to an epidemic of "Dissociative Disorder" at the end of the twentieth century and draw all kinds of conclusions- correlated with the shifts to Placedon and Zephyrill as the drugs of choice for these illnesses-when hi fact it was the clever work of an ace accountant someplace hi the dull underbelly of America-Bozerland-coming up with something that might just make his rich insurance boss richer.

Emerson 2 and 3 were quiet. From Emerson 1, Hannah's ward, came the usual bedlam, crazed screams and counter-screams, echoing like gunfire.

We stared as if at a war memorial. We were finally done with Heiler.

Not quite, for who should come out of the main door but Heiler and Hannah. They walked down the granite steps and headed toward his BMW. Hannah was talking to him passionately, pleading with him. He just kept on walking, those stick legs almost kicking her aside. At his car, as he raised his key to shoot the lock; she got between him and the door, blocking the infrared ray gun. He stepped back and tried to shoot around her. She blocked him again, standing in his way and gesturing to him, both palms up and shaking as if weighing two fruits. He shook his head no and went up on his toes to try to shoot down past her. At that she leaped up at him, threw herself upon him, but he seemed to turn even more rigid, and say something to her that caused her to go limp. She slid down him to the ground, like snow sliding off a mountain. Heiler stepped gingerly out of the ring of her arms, aimed his key and shot his

car, which answered with a cheery chirp. He got in, turned on the ignition-soothing music came on-backed away from her, and drove off.

"She's been like gettin' it on with him?" Solini asked.

"In Kuala Lumpur?"

The four of us went to Hannah. She was lying in a puddle, weeping.

"He called me a borderline," she cried out. "BPO with SM."

"Sado-Masochism?" Henry asked.

"Survivor Mentality! My parents survived Auschwitz. What'llldo?"

"Please don't lie there in the wet," I said. "C'mon."

We helped her up. -Her legs and arms seemed stiff. A stick figure.

"When did this start, Hannah-babe?"

"After the first conference on Mary Megan."

"When he humiliated you?"

"Ed Slapadek, my analyst, said humiliation was good, a good good thing, and would make my SELF strong. But Blair called me a… a borderline*"

"Takes one to know one, babe," Solini said. 'Tell him that."

"Maybe, honey," Jill said, "you should give him up."

"Ed Slapadek said that would be a cop-out. Prove my SELF weak." She started crying again. But soon the chill sank in, and it seemed to sober her. Calmly, she said, "Please don't tell anyone. Please?"

"But we're worried about you, Hannah," I said.

"Oh I'm okay. Just got a little hysterical. Billy ben Lube would die if he found out. And I wouldn't want to damage Blair's career. Promise?"

Solini and I rolled our eyes, shrugged, and promised.

"Good night." She walked through the mist to a new BMW of her own.

"Quelle malchance," Nique Nique said, "quelle femme malheureux!"

Winding down, we wandered around and found ourselves on the top floor of the research building, looking through the long glass window over the other buildings of Misery, the faint glow of the faraway city reflecting off the underside of clouds, lighting up a dark hint of mountains. I stood with my arms around Jill, my hands clasped on her tummy, her head in the

crook of my neck. Henry and Nique Nique were humming nearby. The scent of formalin. Many jars like those used for canning fruit, but larger. In each jar was a brain. We realized we were in the vault of the Misery Brain Bank.

"Yeck!" I said, feeling squeamish. "Let's go."

"My mother's brain is here somewhere," Jill said. "That's why I came here to work. She was manic-depressive, here for years. It really helped her a lot. My dad and I used to call this place 'Heaven on the Hill.' "

I stared hard at a brain resting by its stem in ajar, marveling at the intricacy of the convolutions, the sulci and gyri, the arteries and nerves, at the emptiness of it now and the irony of its donating itself to science, given what I knew of the artless-ness of brain reps like Errol and Win.

"Hey, Roy," Solini called, holding a jar up to the light. "Look."

We gathered around. The jar had a brain that seemed pinker than most.

The label read: SCORATO, MARY MEGAN.

DRENCHED, JILL AND I climbed the flights to my apartment and stripped to our underwear. At first our lips on each other's were cold. We lay side by side on the bed in the turret, hearing the rain drum on the copper dome above. As I lay there the room began to spin, from all the rum in my cerebellum. I put a foot down on the floor. Next thing I knew Jill was lying on top of me, her back on my front. Then she was reaching around under her rump for my underpants, helping me to slip them off.

… Florida is great and with great weather. We were at a dinner dance at the club last night and it was very nice. My new woods are great and they have a low swing weight…

With a severe contortion of all of our legs, the underpants were dangling off my ankle, her purple satin ones off hers.

"Look, Roy. This would be me as a boy!"

I peered over her neck and saw, rising from between her legs, my penis. I reached to her back to unhook her bra but couldn't do it, and then realized it was a front hook. Away the

halves fell like, yes, cleft hemispheres of a brain. I rolled those plump grapes. We both sighed.

___which is the new theory and that low swing weight

means club head speed will rise…

With a twist Jill eased me in and led one of my hands away from her boob to the tiny sailor standing in the prow of that furry rowboat, I a passenger. For a moment we lay still together, on that edge between shore and water, enticed by wanting to push off but not pushing off.

"Roy, do you believe in E.T.s?"

"E.T.s?"

"Extraterrestrials?"

I didn't know if I did or didn't but what the hell so I said, "Yes."

"You do?" she cried.

"You bet."

"Me too. That's why I love this room-I can keep watching for 'em. When I was a girl, my mother saw one and told people, and they laughed at her. They teased me in school. I'm always on the lookout for 'em. Whenever I get to a place with a view, I look hard. Like in the brain bank."

"Did you see any?"

"No, but I'm keeping my eyes open."

"And this?" I asked, touching her.

"Open," she said, "wide open, buddy, to you."

… so work hard and I know compared to the rest you will be the best at your chosen profession and even if it is not what I expected for you this will be true…

In the warm wet hum of us together with the rain drumming not so much on the roof as on us and in us, I found myself thinking of my time so far in Misery where if you tell the truth they kill you and if you face the truth you kill yourself, winding up with your brain in some gunk in a jar in a lab in a damn bank. I'd learned nothing much about how to do psychiatry but had learned what not to do, how not to harm people by using the tired old descriptions of the world written by men whose hearts were dried up by ambition and whose minds