Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

"Hey, come on," I said, "don't cry."

"Why not? If I don't cry over this, what am I going to cry over?"

"I can't stand you crying."

"If you can't stand a person crying you're in the wrong business."

"Patients lean stand. This is different. You're not my pa-"

'Terrific-you're empathic with strangers, but not with your…"

"My whatT

"Whatever it was, it's not anymore!" She was furious now, her eyes afire, the pupils harsh, like pins. "You need help! And I'm sick and tired of trying to give it-without getting anything back."

"Nothing I do is ever enough!"

"Forget it!" she cried out, grabbing for her coat and hat. As she got up, she knocked over the lamp, and the bulb smashed, so that the only light was a hellish shaft from the bedroom. "Shit," she said. She started to bend to pick it up, but then straightened back up and kicked it as hard as she could across the living room, where it brought down a small table and a

bottle of George Dickel sippin' whiskey. She walked out, slamming the door. Her footsteps fell away down the stairs, one flight, two, diminished, diminished, died.

Devastated, I sank to the floor, numb, desolate, hoping against hope that she'd come back, listening for her footsteps rising toward my door instead of falling away.

Then I heard them. A knock on the door. I opened it.

Jill. Her face was tense.

"I saw her leave, and I couldn't stand it. I need to see you."

"Come on in."

"No. It's not safe. Let's go for a ride in my car."

We went out. It had suddenly turned cold, freezing everything. We drove in the full moonlight along the mountain valley roads, the reflection off the ice on the fields making the night brighter than the day, which had been overcast with low clouds. The rare cloud was now like a child's fuzzy animal, say a polar bear, or a white whale, filmed with silver from above. I felt cold and numb.

"I have a real fondness for power lines," Jill said as they dipped and rose alongside us, in one long straight clear stretch beside the White River. "They're beautifully designed- almost like Chinese characters. I'm having trouble right now, with you and her. She's so intelligent, so educated-it makes me feel really inferior. I'm at a turning point in my life, I know that, but I've never had a real turning point before. I mean if you've never gone to college, or got married, or been in the armed forces, you never had turning points. I don't do them all that well."

"Yeah, well, if it's any comfort, I've had a lot of 'em, and I don't do all that well either." We meandered along, not talking much, really.

"One thing I've learned," she said. "A guy's truth in bed doesn't translate to truth in talking, but mine does. But I liked what you said before about grief. It was like from your heart."

"Thanks," I said numbly.

We got back to where she was staying up the street. I got out. Jill sat there. I went around to the driver's side. She rolled down the window. It was freezing cold and it was hard to keep my footing on all the ice.

"You really love her, don't you?"

"I have, and in a deep way I still do. She's like family. But it's pretty much over, I think."

"I know what I'm up against now. Something about actually meeting her, seeing her really real, woke me up. So good-bye."

"Please, don't-"

"Let's not drag it out. It's gonna be a disaster for me if I keep on with you, I just feel it. Just leave."

I tried to talk to her, but she rolled up her window. I tapped on it, to no avail, and tried to mouth words to her-"I love you"-but my breath crystallized to ice, obscuring her face and, to her, my lips. Finally I gave up and turned around, but my feet slid out from under me and I had to grab her side rearview mirror.

She rolled down the window. She was sobbing, and she clutched my hand clutching the freezing mirror and said, "I don't care if it's bad for me. I can't give you up. I love you."

VIOLENCE, DEATH, AND mutilation were the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost of Misery after Christmas. In my five weeks on Toshiba, I had gotten used to people being crazy. I was having a hellish time with people being violent.

Insurance, under pressure to pay out more money, was paying out less. The only ticket into Misery was violence, violence toward yourself or to someone else. People tried, tried damn hard. Ever since Christmas the weather too had turned violent, first an infernal mix of snow and drizzle, and then a relentless arctic wind that seemed to knock the breath out of your lungs and fling your testicles up toward your spleen. An ice pack had slid down off Canada, quick-freezing everything. The world turned to ice. Ice coated car windows and locks, front steps and front walks, sidewalks, roads, runways. Men ventured out to chip and chop and sand and salt it away. Chip-pers snapped, choppers split, sand got into everything-the ice was like iron. Giving up, returning to the house and being asked by the wife why the walk was still icy, the car stuck, the boots shedding sand on the rug, the man might snap, or start chipping or chopping at the wife or house-bound kids. Someone would call Misery. Misery would call Insurance. Insurance would turn them away.

Yet some of them, the Walking Worried, would just show

up. They would sit in the lobby of Toshiba, hoping to talk to a doctor. Each day by midday they were spilling out onto the front walk and frozen lawn, trying to get a foothold on the ice. When I or Nash or Tunaba would walk by, they would clutch at us. We would try to escape, slipping and sliding away. Some camped out in cars and vans. Some held up pill bottles like petitions. It was heart-wrenching.

My last day on Toshiba, the last day of the year, was hell: a run of horrific admissions, the sequelae of violent, mutilating acts. By admission Number 21, I was fresh out of compassion, for the day, the year, and maybe even, I realized with alarm, for the rest of my life. Number 21 was a 31 y.o. heroin addict with a CC: "I'm in withdrawal, I need detox, and this is the only place in the state that will take me." Unfortunately, while he'd been waiting in the lobby, the last bed on Heidelberg East, Alcohol and Drug, had been filled. I had to refuse him admission.

"What the fuck am I supposed to do!" he screamed. "I'm in withdrawal, I feel like shit, I gotta get a fix."

"Do whatever you've been doing. Maybe a bed will open up tomorrow."

"What I been doin', Doc, is knockin' over little ol' ladies in the street and snatchin' their purses. Is that what you, in your professional opinion, are tellin' me to do? Go out right now and knock over another little old lady?"

"Christmas is history. We're all in full-catastrophe mode now."

That morning the Boston Globe had published a list, in chronological order, of every woman and child killed by a man during the past year. It averaged out to one woman or child killed every five days. A woman had been killed every nine days. A child had been killed every fifteen days. Many men, after killing the women and children, killed themselves. A week before, the upper half of the torso of a Swedish au pair had been found in a Dumpster. Terror turned to horror.

The latest murders had been just the day before in a "safe" suburb; a family named Quist. Norman Quist first slit the throats of his two small children and dumped their bodies in a river, then came back home and bludgeoned his wife Colleen to death. He then shot himself dead.

I had just admitted Colleen's sister, with a Chief Complaint:

"I was the one who found my sister's body. Her head was split open by an ax and her brains were all spilled out and blood was soaking everything. Everywhere I go, I see her lying there, the ragged white of her skull, the dark blood, the pink brains. And he slit the throats of his children? They were angels, little angels. How can I live with this?"