Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

His words went against everything he had taught me so far. "I know what you're trying to do, Malik. It won't work."

"Yeah, these suckers are doomedl So feed some shrink bullshit into that bullshit computer and we'll choose up sides. This weather makes me want to shake and bake!" He wiggled his hips, dribbling the ball, and I sensed the "hoop fever," so familiar to me-a hum of vitality in my body and head every November, my pulse quickening, happiness sparking in my palm with each tap tap tap of the ball on the pavement on my walk down to the gym. "Over to Jordan!" he cried, throwing it tome.

I had played basketball in Columbia, in fact had been co-captain with the immortal George Konopski of the Columbia High School Fish Hawks. Basketball had been my one-way ticket out of the foreign country of my family, my ticket into

the life of buddies and bodies and girls. In one smooth motion I caught the ball in one hand and spun it easily up onto my index finger, then "walked" it down each finger in turn, keeping it spinning, until, spinning it on my pinkie, I popped it back to him. Years to learn this.

"Hey hey hey!" he said. "You play hoop!"

"Saved my life."

"Me too!" Malik said. "Come on."

"Me three!" Solini said.

"You too?" I asked, startled, given his minuscule size.

"Point guard, Mandan Braves. Unbeaten, my senior year, till we played the Fort Yates Warriors, in their gym down on Standing Rock Reservation. Everett Chasinghawk, their point guard, stole me silly. Same dude that stole my wife last year. We were doing okay till they got out their war drums for their fight song, 'On the Warpath'-we crumpled."

"C'mon, Roy," Malik said, like a little kid dying to play, "c'monl"

"Can't. I'm way behind." Shaking their heads, they started to leave. "Hey wait a second, Malik. What do you mean they're doomed?"

"Once they come into the Misery system, they gotta hope they run into guys like us, who are out of it, to help 'em out of it. Tell you what. Gimme the name age sex address occupation religion and Chief Complaint of each of your admissions. I'll give you back the DSM diagnosis."

I did.

And then he did. He hit every DSM diagnosis, ten for ten. Every damn one.

"But doesn't that just mean," I asked, "that the diagnosis is right?"

"Nope, it just means that it's bullshit. If you ask the 'normal' status quo questions, you get the 'normal' status quo answers. Like cancer. In the last fifteen years overall cancer rates are up twenty percent! Everybody's gettin' cancer! Kids, for Chrissakes! Don't you have friends who have cancer? Think." Reluctantly I thought, and realized that I had gotten a number of phone calls since I'd been back, from friends, and friends of friends, sudden terrified calls announcing melanoma, pancreas, breast, asking me for help

in finding them good medical care. I nodded. "We all know somebody. I got two cancer calls already since I got back- one's my nephew, who's only three-leukemia! People our age-lymphoma, ovarian-this didn't happen to our parents! When they look back, this is gonna be known as the Age of Cancer."

"Yeah, man," Henry said, "but what's that got to do like with this?"

"That's what I'm telling you. Getting cancer is 'normal' now."

"So what do we do?" I asked. "Give up?"

"The hell! We open our eyes, we take it all in. We fight the 'normal' bastards putting all the shit in our water, earth, air- the air we breathe, do you believe it? And we take care of business in here." He tapped his chest, in the zone of his heart.

I'd forgotten how intense Malik was, volcanic, a force of nature wrapped in tinty glasses and sports mania and dumb-jock talk.

Malik wiped his brow, and finished his carrot. "Jeez, you get me going, Basch-how do you do it anyways? I was so peaceful in Yisroel." He bounced the ball and pivoted smoothly away. Then he stopped and turned back. "Look," he said. "These people coming in here are sick of a sick world. They're the canaries in the mine shaft, kid. Just like us."

"Us?"

"Who else? Right, Solini?"

Solini juked and jived, and sang some Marley.

"Just remember, Roy," Malik said, "when you're all computer-literate 'n' cold? Like they say in Hollywood: 'You meet the same people on the way back down.' "

"But I don't have the time it takes to connect with these people."

"Schmucko, schmucko! You still think connecting is a matter of timeT

"Okay, then-I don't have the energy."

"The energy ain't in you, like a little battery; the energy comes from the connecting*. Like in tennis, taking a ball on a short hop, using its own momentum to fire it back harder over the net, or-" He threw a no-look pass at Solini, hitting him in the nose. "-making a touch pass in hoopl"

THE SIREN'S WAIL rose in pitch. It was almost five o'clock, and I saw Nash heading out the front door, with Jennifer following close behind. With so much unfinished work, I felt I needed to talk to him. I ran out and caught him just as he was getting into his black Lincoln Continental Town Car with tinted windows.

"I need to talk to you," I said. The siren came closer.

"You can't. It's five o'clock." Jennifer was getting into her car, a black Lexus.

"But if they stay for only seven days, what the hell are we doing to help them?"

'Toshiba keeps them safe, gives them meds, I'm out of here." He got in. I stopped the door from closing with my foot.

"Seven days of safety and meds doesn't do fuck-all for most of them."

"So after seven days they go back out, and then come back in, sooner, sicker. They get sicker and sicker sooner and sooner till finally their insurance company can't legally not send them further into Misery, for longer stays on In-patient Unit. Now get your damn foot outta my door."

"But what about-"

Suddenly the siren was close, and then closer, and it was heading right for Toshiba, and, seeing it, Nash shouted-"Get away!" — and I thought it was so he could get out to tend to this emergency but in fact it was so he could slam the door and get out before the emergency emerged.

I watched him peel the Continental off and down the hill and watched the Lexus tail him down and then I was caught up in the emergency. The EMTs rushed the body of a young woman into the lobby. Reflexively I slipped into real doctor mode, asking the medics what they knew-"OD, barely breathing when we found her, maybe barbiturates, maybe heroin, she was scheduled to be admitted here tomorrow"-and started doing all the brutal, desperate medical things to get a heartbeat and a breath.

Solini arrived and joined in-he was the DOC. We tried everything, nothing worked. Finally, exhausted and scared- for she was young, younger than Henry and me-we pulled the sheet up over her face and retreated to the boardroom, where we slumped down into our chairs.

"Sorry, Cowboy, it's rough. Shall I send in the next of kin?"

Henry looked at me sadly. I said, "We do it together?"

"Cool," he said.

Her husband came in, a solid-looking young man with a blond crew cut and a colorful work shirt. He sat down and turned to me. "How bad is it, Doc?"

"Bad," I said, trying to keep my voice steady. "She's dead."

He stared at me for a second, then at Solini, then turned away. And then he screamed, "Bitch! Fucking bitch!" threw his chair down and stormed out.

"Not what I expected," I said to Henry.

"No joke. In psychiatry you've gotta have no expectations about patients and no interest in them."

"What?" I said, startled. "Who told you that?"

"Dr. A. K. Lowell, the chief on Thoreau, the Family Unit. She's classic Freud. I started my rotation with her today. She was totally silent the whole day, and then at the end she said that. She's weird, but maybe about that she's cool?"

AS IF WEIGHTS were attached to my feet, I trudged out of Toshiba sometime after nine at night.