Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

At Misery, Buildings and Grounds were confused, splashing through the muddy lawns to hang decorations on droopy, overheated pines. With the weather so crazy-and with the ad campaigns suggesting that it was a person's right if not duty to have a Happy Holiday-people were having a harder time staying sane. Global warming was in the air. The snowcapped peaks of the impassive shadowing mountains seemed to mock the foothill dwellers, for snow lay only on inaccessible slopes. The nearby ski areas were barren, but for a trail or two of fake

snow, as tattered as the pots of pooping poinsettias in the malls.

People flocked to Misery. The number of admissions, already high, went higher. My daily admissions moved up from an average of seven, to nine, then to eleven. In response, health care insurance denials of health care payments went higher still. Protocols were altered, loopholes in policies appeared. The daily discharges moved up from an average of eight to ten, and then to twelve. Like a parasite in the bowels of the hospital, health care insurance was making sure that, no matter how many of the mentally unhealthy were fed in, many more were purged out. A voracious animal, Misery needed constantly to be fed.

Nash and Tunaba fought back. They spent hours huddled over the big Toshiba in their shared office, reading from right to left-from the dollar amount of the latest health insurance payments to whichever DSM diagnosis was now bankable. If suddenly insurance was paying top dollar for, say, 301.13, Cyclothymic Disorder, the big Toshiba would be repro-grammed to reprogram all the little Toshibas, so that for data I typed in that previously had led to my sweet little Toshiba laptop spewing out, say, 302.90, Atypical Paraphelia, now it would spew out, time after tune like a run of luck at craps in Vegas, 301.13, 301.13, 301.13, and-wait for it-301.13: Cyclothymic Disorder.

On the day of Christmas Eve, I was sitting behind the bulletproof with Viv-they'd built a new bulletproof for the holiday season in the Toshiba lobby-looking out at the crush of people trying to get into Misery. The lobby was packed with people fleeing the normal world, seeking asylum. Primo Jones was doing some serious nothing, standing around, trying to control the crowd.

"I ain't so sure Christ died for this, Doc, y'know what I'm sayin'?"

All day long, tormented by nonstop Christmas carols on the Muzak system, I had been clicking along, admitting patients to McMisery as efficiently as a kid flipping burgers at McDonald's, making diagnoses spanning the "Slee-eep in Heavenly Peace" sky from 313.21, Avoidant Disorder of Childhood, to 293.82, Organic Senile Hallucinosis; from 302.72, Inhibited Sexual Excitement, across the street to

302.75, Premature Ejaculation; and from 295.70, the dire Schizoaffective Disorder, over to the strangely enticing 312.33, Kleptomania.

Now, with Primo for security, I interviewed a violent middle-aged Italian bricklayer with a Chief Complaint of "I am God."

"How do you know you're God?" I asked.

"Because I was chosen."

"Why were you chosen to be God?"

"Because I was in hell. You want proof?" He unbuttoned his shirt. On his belly was a magnificent tattoo of The Last Supper. Clearly it had been done many years before, when what was now his belly had been his chest, and when he'd been thinner, for now it had expanded, so that Christ and the Apostles were all wearing broad grins.

"What'd you think, Doc?" Primo asked after we'd locked him up.

"298.80. Brief Reactive Psychosis."

"Youse don't think he's God."

"He may be, but it's not reimbursable."

I went to see an adolescent carrying what seemed to be a vacuum cleaner-indeed it said "Panasonic"-but it was covered with aluminum foil and had a fur coat on it. Instead of the standard attachments it had a huge metal funnel which the kid kept pointing at the ceiling as he jumped around. Primo came up and started standing around, to protect me. I asked what the thing was.

"Orgone accumulator," the kid said. 'To catch the orgone particles. It's homemade, but it works. I took a welding course to make it. Lotta particles during Christmas. I carry it everywhere."

"And what do people say when they see it?"

"They say, 'Oh I see you've got your orgone accumulator with you.' What the hell do you think they say?"

Primo and I rolled eyes, and Primo said, "I got the diagnosis, Doc. What you got there is a WEFT."

I asked, what was a WEFT?

"Wrong Every Fuckin' Time. What that kid needs is to stick 'im hi a clothes dryer and keep feedin' in the quarters."

In the waiting room was the kid's shrink, a Reichian. I thought he might help me to understand what was going on,

but he too was holding a vacuum cleaner, in this case with the runnel reversed, so that the narrow end was pointing at the ceiling like a gun. "It's a cloudbuster," the man said. "Whenever I see that kid, my body armor tightens up. I've been getting Rolfed, myself."

"Now I can die happy, Doc," Primo said. "Now I've seen everything."

Not quite, for next was a dazzling young woman wearing a "God Made the Irish Number One" button, dressed provocatively for the heat of summer, her Chief Complaint: "Insurance put a rider on my breasts but Jesus never fails."

I finished her up and headed off to the Farben for Lloyal von Nott's Christmas reception. On my way out I was buttonholed again by the Woody Allen look-alike in the tweed sport coat and tie, the man named Sedders who didn't know how suicidal he really was and who was trying to get hi touch with the doctors of his HMO-Healthycare Inc.-to certify his admission to Misery.

"I finally got through to a doctor!" he said excitedly.

"Great. I knew your persistence would pay off."

"I said that if he didn't authorize my admission to Mount Misery before the end of the year-next week-that I was going to kill myself, and that my lawyers were aware of this fact."

"Good thinking. When you mention lawyers, doctors start listening."

"That's what I thought, but then he said, 'You've been saying the same thing to our allied health professionals for several weeks now, and you haven't even made a suicide gesture, let alone an attempt. It doesn't sound all that much like an acute emergency anymore.' I told him that it was, but he said, 'I have to put you on hold.' I waited for almost half an hour, but he never took me off hold. Now what do I do?"

"Call back, start out sounding rational and then start screaming."

"Okay. Merry Christmas! Oh God! Now I've offended you, I'm sorry!"

"How have you offended me?"

"You're Jewish, right? You don't believe hi Christmas."

"Who does anymore, I mean really?"

"Yeah." He squirmed and looked away, the way men do

when they are about to try to make contact. "Dr. Basch, you're turning out to be my only friend."

DIXIE "THE BARRACUDA" DOVE loomed over her man in the receiving line, her holiday dress and hat sporting such luxuriant fruits that she seemed a living advertisement for a Chanukah cruise up the Amazon. The Misery Christmas reception was traditionally held hi the Danebiel Ballroom, named after a former chairman of the board of Misery who had the IQ of a paper clip and a fortune made out of nothing, in stocks and bonds. Lloyal von Nott had been his therapist, from midlife crisis and divorce through an Alzheimer's so fierce that for years he referred to Lloyal as "Dear Uncle Caleb." Such was his love for Lloyal that upon his death he left a pile of stocks and bonds to Misery, on condition that his name be put on a ballroom.

Everyone was there, from the olive-green-clad Buildings and Grounds clustering around the vodka punch, through the red-clad and broad-beamed nurses and secretaries and social workers grazing on the jumbo shrimp and prime rib, to the black-suited shrinks and administrators huddling in the corners as if their lives would be hi danger if they actually talked to these lesser ones adangle in the flowchart below them.