Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

"Shit!" Berry said, staring at the burnt tofu and beans in the pan balancing on the pile of dishes in the sink. "Sorry."

"It's okay. Let's go out to dinner."

"Fine. Where shall we go?"

"Let's go to Miguel's."

"How about Pentimento?"

"Okay," I said, not really caring, "let's go to Pentimento."

She paused, studying me. "But it sounded like you wanted to go to Miguel's."

"No, no, it's okay-let's go where you want to go."

"But I want to go where you want to go too." She considered this, and asked, "Why don't you want to go to Pentimento?"

Feeling more tense, I said, "I just want to decide."

"We are deciding."

"We're not getting anywhere. Let's just make a decision."

The phone began ringing.

"Why are you yelling at me?"

"I'm not yelling!"

We stared at each other. The answering machine picked up.

" 'Hi, Berr, it's Chandra, just checking in. Are we on for tomorrow night? Call me. 'Bye now.' "

Berry and I stared harder and longer at each other.

"What?" she asked.

"Who's that?"

"A friend. She's a divinity student, working part-time at the nursery school."

"A friend?"

"Yes, a good friend. Someone who really understands. You know what it's like when you meet someone like that?"

"A woman?" The specter of gender floated across the room, cutting through the acrid scent of beans ruined, beans deferred. Our eyes met, did a little dance of unspeakable loss, and then disengaged.

"Doesn't have to be. We're going to the movies tomorrow. C'mon."

"What a world!" I said. "Men like women, and women like women too. We're doomed!"

We fought our way through the slicing cold wind and got into her car. The heater was broken and we shivered the whole way to the Hunan Haven, a good choice because it was so plain and bad it reminded us of the Xiangxiang Hotel restaurant in Changsha, China. We'd worked together in Changsha during a flood of the Xiangjiang River the past spring, the last stop before we'd come back to the States. Now we parked in back of a car whose bumper sticker read:

MY KID BEAT UP YOUR HONOR STUDENT

Back from the trip we'd been startled at how America had become a nation of bumper stickers, and by now we were desensitized, but this seemed particularly ominous.

I out my hand,

The bare tables and the waiters speaking a dialect of Chinese that sounded like nothing so much as a bunch of spoons jangling together in a bag, and the food-memory-simple, fresh, with scary spices that made our tear ducts well up like ripe lichees-lifted us back to our time in China, before these Chandras and Jills and shrinks and the thug who bought the bumper sticker, and I felt a dreadful burden of guilt. The owner's daughter, a three-year-old girl of meticulous and dazzling beauty, brought us our check. We both stared at her in awe, caught suddenly in the trap of our infertility.

"Hey, buddy," I said, "I'm sorry." I reached 01 palm up.

"Me too. Everything in the world seems so precarious right now."

My love for her rushed in. I squeezed her hand, meaning it. She squeezed mine.

"Thanks," she said, her eyes tearing up. "Are you thinking about Changsha too?"

"Yeah. Working together at the orphanage during the flood-was it only last May? Seems years ago now, doesn't it?"

"Ages ago, yes."

"Seeing the rows of cribs with the newborns," I said, "all girls-and then realizing what it meant. It was the closest I ever felt to you."

"And I you," she answered softly. "All those abandoned baby girls, five to a crib, with just a date of birth tacked up over each head, in a little plastic packet. Five to a crib, all five under the same red and gold quilt. The parched light. Coal smoke."

"We fed them bottles of soy milk and rice."

"And when they cried," she said, "no one came to comfort them."

"Except us."

"Yes, we did," she said, almost whispering.

Now tears came to my own eyes. Hand in hand, we left.

Out on the street we were struck by a blast of icy air and stinging sleet that knocked us both back a step. We had to clutch each other to keep from falling. It was the first real hit of the cold that every November clenched its fist around the heart of New England.

"I hate this climate!" I shouted, leaning into the gale.

"Me too!" she shouted back.

"Let's move to China!" I shouted, thinking palm trees and dim sum. "We've got enough money to live out our lives like kings!"

"And queens! Deal!"

We stayed the night together, feeling like together we'd survived a grave threat. Jill was in my mind, but in a different compartment. I slept restlessly, Berry soundly. I awoke at three hi the morning to find her cat had placed the bloody head of a mouse neatly in front of my face.

The next morning Berry was off to Child Place Cooperative School and I off to my first day of rny new rotation-Toshiba, Admissions. As we were leaving, just before opening the front door and facing the howling snowy wind, Berry asked, "Remember what I said about the holidays?"

"They're the worst."

"The absolute worst. Holidays are hell for people. Admissions to mental hospitals go way up. Brace yourself. Thanksgiving to New Year's is the worst time of year."

"OUR BEST TIME, the whole fiscal year!" said Nash Michaels, M.D., J.D., Director of Admissions at Misery. "Admissions go up severalfold. In parallel with the holiday boom in retail stores. Thirty percent of our gross profit per annum arises hi this single five-week period."

It was later that morning, and I was sitting in the luxurious Toshiba boardroom. Nash Michaels was a real "maybe" kind of guy. Maybe he was more a doctor than a lawyer and maybe he was more a lawyer than a doctor; maybe an honest lawyer who'd help you out of your jam, maybe a smiler who'd wind up owning your house; maybe fifty, maybe forty; maybe those turtle-lidded eyes hid something smart, maybe something unalterably stupid; maybe his first name was a sign that he was from the proud lineage of Schlomo's first analyst the pitiful Nash, or maybe he was named by a kooky mother after an extinct automobile; maybe that dark wavy hair and five-o'clock shadow were sinister, maybe dextrous; maybe he'd lost that forearm now replaced by a hook in a terrific war, maybe in a suburban wood pulper; maybe he'd gotten a good education, maybe not-when I'd asked where he'd gone to

college, he had put a hand over his mouth and slurred it so that maybe he said "Harvard" and maybe he said "Harpur"; maybe all in all he was a Brahmin from Boston, or maybe just as all in all a little pisher from Brooklyn. The one thing he was not maybe about was the future. As clearly as seeing a razor in a mirror, Nash Michaels had seen the future of American psychiatry. It lay between his legs, in his laptop computer.

Yet maybe not, for he was not the only director of Toshiba. With us was Jennifer Tunaba, a tall young Japanese woman whose English was peppered, with techno-cybertalk. Jennifer was an M.B.A. Her father, a wealthy industrialist, was said to have told von Nott, "You hire my daughter, I promote Misery in Japan." So Mount Misery had become the mental hospital in the world for those rich Japanese whose minds had been crushed by the same culture they had been taught to revere. Once admitted, they were spirited away to a bilingual ward upstairs called The Golden Path.

I soon learned that this arrangement, cochiefs of Toshiba, was a stroke of genius on Lloyal's part. In the flowchart on the wall before my eyes, both Nash Michaels, M.D., J.D., and Jennifer Tunaba, M.B.A., were trapped in little rectangular boxes connected by a line and then, like a mobile, the line suspended from other boxes and lines suspended from Lloyal. The suspension was done with immaculate equality, so that, given both Michaels's and Tunaba's blasting desire to advance upward, their frantic contortions to get ahead only caused their Me boxes to bang into each other and carom back to an uneasy distance. Nash hated Tunaba for her lack of medical knowledge; she hated him for his lack of business knowledge. Each constantly tried to knife the other in the back, though given the flowchart, it had to be clear to each that if one box were emptied, the other, like a seesaw suddenly unbalanced, would throw its occupant up into the no-man's-land below Lloyal, to dangle. And not dangle neatly, no. The dangle would be at an angle, and for a flowchart, ruled and balanced, an angle was cancer. The empty box would soon be filled. If the body filling it was not of the same weight, appropriate weight would be added, to balance again, like when you buy and balance new tires. Aligned, the chart would flow along to nowhere once again.