Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

manic-depressive, manic phase; the older, normal. The spot was so peaceful, the lowering sun muted to cool through the coppery curtain of leaves so friendly, the soft phwop phwop of the ball on the strings so soothing, I dozed off.

LATER THAT EVENING I got a lift out to the suburbs to Ike White's Freud seminar with another first-year resident named Henry Solini. Misery kept us new residents so busy, so isolated from one another on our separate wards, that I'd never had a chance to talk with Solini. He was a crooked-smiled little guy with dark curly hair ending in a short neat ponytail, mischievous eyes, and a thin gold ring in one ear. He dressed down, shirts and slacks instead of suits and ties, and had already been dressed down for this by the powers that be in Misery. In late afternoon I'd ran into Henry in the hallway of the attic of Toshiba, when both of us had rushed out of our tiny offices onto the iron fire escape to stare down at a tremendous commotion on the Cyclone-fenced tennis courts three floors below. Solini was so tiny, he barely came up to my shoulder.

Six men had cornered Split Risk Harrison, the patient I'd let out. He was screaming, "You crucified Christ, you crucify sweet Bill Clinton, don't you realize who you're crucifying now?"

The six mental health professionals rushed him. He ran full-tilt and hurdled the net, only to find the gate locked. He turned, spread his arms against the chain-link fence, and said, "Listen. This relationship is not working. You've got to get to know your crucifixee, okay?"

They jumped him, tied him up, and carried him away.

"Wrong coast," Solini said, looking up at me.

"Wrong coast?"

"On the West Coast he'd be pretty normal, no problem. All my life I've been trying to expand the definition of normal."

As we drove out to Ike White's house, Solini hunched over the steering wheel of his brash red Geo with the North Dakota plate reading "Discover the Spirit: Peace Garden State," he told me about himself. He'd been born of Italian-Czech heritage and raised in Mandan, North Dakota, where his family ran Ideal Cleaners. "I grew up with wheat farmers and Lakota Sioux. My best Indian buddies would sit around town with

their legs cut off from falling asleep drunk on the railroad tracks on their way back to the reservation in Fort Yates."

"Sounds pretty bad."

"No foolin'. I have this idea that the dry-cleaning fumes stunted my growth." With a sorrowful glance at me he said, "I'm only five-two."

He'd escaped to Reed College, then med school and internship in San Francisco. His medical internship, which he'd finished just the month before, had been every bit as horrifying and disillusioning as my own in the hospital nicknamed 'The House of God," with the added hell of his caring for large numbers of AIDS patients. Many of his friends had died of AIDS.

"Man, I am worn out," he said. "Not only from the internship, but from singing at funerals."

"You sing?"

"Reggae. I'm the only white man who ever was lead vocalist in Jamaica Juice, I mean medicine is one thing, but Bob Marley and the Waiters is something else." He flipped on the tape deck and for a while we listened to the hard-driving revolutionary joy. I asked why he'd gone into psychiatry.

"I love working with crazy people," he said. The little guy rolled his hands around on the steering wheel, his rolling hands rolling his arms, his arms, his body, until he was almost dancing in the seat and I had to grab the wheel myself.

"But why'd you come to Misery? It's like the Wall Street of psychiatry."

"Misery's cool. I need a rest. Three thousand miles from my ex. I heard Ike White speak once, out in Berkeley. He was cool. I didn't get to meet him in person, just talked on the phone. I came here for him."

"Yeah, me too." Looking at his ponytail and earring, I asked, "But how did you get accepted?"

"Geographical distribution and good C.fuckin'-V."

"But what about the photo? The application photo?"

"No problem. Sent 'em one from my yearbook."

"Med school?" He shook his head no. "College?"

"Get real. I had hair down to my waist and three earrings. One in my damn nose. High school. The Mandan High Braves. Basketball. Crew cut. No jewelry. No problem. So what about you, Roy-babe?"

I told him that during my year in the House of God I'd gotten pretty cynical about medicine, feeling something was missing in my being a doctor, not to mention in my life. "I've had enough poodling around in diseased bodies. I can do bodies now. But I never feel I really understand. I want to understand people, that's all."

"Well, it's been a month. You understand anything yet? I mean really?"

I thought about this. "Starting to, a little, with Ike. But that's gotta be a good thing to do in the world, right?"

"Pretty noble, man. Pretty high hopes. Could be trouble." Inside Ike's house Henry and I headed for the bar and poured bourbons. We met in a living room, which, in contrast to Ike's office at Misery, was tidy and formal, all urethaned hardwood and Laura Ashley, implying Mrs. Dee. Ike offered cigars. Henry and I were the only takers, aside from Ike himself. Dee leading, we walked into Freud.

I had read the evening's paper, "Mourning and Melancholia," during my medical internship. As I listened to Dee lead us through it, I was impressed. It wasn't only that Ike was brilliant, he was so damn modest. He almost apologized for even teaching us this arcane Viennese stuff in the era of high-tech psychiatry. Dee sparkled.

The monograph was about the grieving process. Freud dissected the difference between normal neurotic grief- "mourning"-and pathological grief-"melancholia," or depression. "The heart of the difference between normal and sick," Ike said, "is captured in a single remarkable line." With passion, Ike quoted, " 'The shadow of the lost object falls across the ego.' "

Between the bourbon and the sleep deprivation I soon had a buzz on and drifted in and out. My fellow residents soon were sounding very intelligent about this mourning, this melancholia, this Freud.

Saying good-bye to me, Dee seemed concerned. "Are you ok-kay?"

"Sure. Just a little wiped."

'That p-patient Harrison splitting-was that d-difficult for you?"

"No," I said, surprised that he knew about this. "Not really." "Working with sick people is p-pretty stressful."

"Can't be more stress than doing straight medicine."

A slight delay-about two seconds-and then Dee said, "It's a different k-kind of stress."

Creeping home in the cozy red Geo, soon Solini and I were singing along with Bob Marley's "Them Belly Full (But We Hungry)."

After Solini dropped me off I stumbled roughly up the narrow and trickily reversing three flights of stairs to my loft on the top floor of an old turreted Victorian and found Berry asleep in a chair. I hadn't seen her in a few days. How lovable she looked, that long, tan Modigliani face tucked snugly into her bared shoulder, her blouse unbuttoned, the lace of her bra bulging bright and white against her deep tan, her short dark hair mussed and long black lashes two crescents on her cheeks. Her full lower lip was a pillow for her upper, both curled in a half smile, as if her dream was sweet. Knowing her recent pain, her struggle with self-confidence and her vulnerability, I felt glad for that hah7 smile.

I'd been with Berry for almost a decade. After my hellish year of medical internship and her hellish one as a child psychologist at another high-powered hospital, we'd decided we needed time together, to get to know each other again, and to try to heal. We'd taken a year off and traveled around the world, beginning in southern France, ending just a month before in southern China. During our year of freedom, our relationship had deepened. We'd talked about getting married. Yet we each felt that first we had to see what it would be like back in the high-test rocket of America.