Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

When I came to giving her a DSM diagnosis, my mind got stuck. She wasn't crazy, she was what anyone would be: crushed. But she needed time to heal, to be safe. The hospital wasn't a bad place to stay for a while, for her. But her insurance wanted her treated as an outpatient. I gave her the most innocuous DSM for which they would pay, "296.20, Major Depression, Single Episode," and she made it in.

I felt sick. Sick not only at the carnage, but at being a man. For most people, who learn about a killing by watching TV, the killing fades as quickly as anything on TV, basically gone by the next commercial and helped along to oblivion by the commercial itself and the fake TV killing that soon follows, leaving no residue. But in Misery I had to live with the aftermath of the carnage, the enduring reality. What most people looked at from a couch as a flat run of pixels, I saw. Saw what it did to real live human beings, how it lasted not the six minutes to the next commercial, not six hours six months six years, but a lifetime. More-how it echoed down the generations. For weeks I had been having nightmares. I walked around enraged, sick at heart.

I wasn't totally alone. One potential admission that day was a 32 y.o. assistant district attorney with a CC of "I'm supposed to get married next week but after seeing all the killing and things done to the kids I keep thinking over and over that if I do go ahead and get married and have kids I might wind up doing the same. Four out of ten American households have a gun. I have a gun. I've lost my faith, I guess. Is that crazy or what?"

"I've lost my faith too. You'd be crazy not to. Insurance won't accept it. Go home to your fiancee."

I went on, on autopilot, my heart as hidden and numb as the tiny silicon one hidden somewhere inside my laptop-except for a jolt when I remembered Lily Putnam's black eye. Could Cherokee, out there somewhere on the loose, turn even more violent and turn up in tomorrow's headline, something like

WILD WASP WASTES WIFE, KIDS, PROMINENT SHRINK S. DOVE,

SELF. In an icy sweat I called Aspen information. No luck. I left a message on his home machine to call at once, knowing I wouldn't sleep easily until I heard they were all safe.

"YOU STOBBED CARING about me and I don'wanna livel"

This was the CC of my next to last admission that day, Number 23, none other than my patient Zoe, who had come in totally drunk.

Since her discharge from Emerson, she had done well in therapy with me, helped along by her LAMBS partner, Thorny. They had continued to live together in Misery Garden Apartments. Thorny was going to NA-Narcotics Anonymous-and volunteering at a local recycling and alternative energy company.

Zoe and Thorny had decided, since they were doing well, to show their near and dear ones just how well they were doing. Wouldn't it be cool, these good buddies thought, to spend the holidays visiting each other's families? Big mistake. The trip to Louisiana to meet "the Burn King of the Bayous" had gone badly, given Thorny's new focus on cleaning up his father's mess. They left early for Palm Springs, California, where Zoe's family wintered in Rancho Mirage, an armored enclave of the rich set between Bob Hope Drive and Frank Sinatra Way.

I hadn't seen Zoe in a few weeks. Now I was stunned by how she had changed: her tall, slender, college-girl frame was no longer in jeans and blouse and Reeboks, but in flowery dress and gold lame shoes and fake red fingernails, her light brown hair now in a garish fading perm. She was heavily made up, the makeup so messed up that her aquiline nose seemed stuck in her sun-reddened, feverish face. The Rancho Mirage look. Having used booze to come down off a long run on cocaine, she was totally exhausted, drunk, sniffing and blowing her nose, and slurring her words.

"She's been fighting with her mother and father," Thorny said, "and scorin' coke since Christmas. She's up to almost a fifth of scotch a day. Her parents wanted her to go to Betty Ford, but I got her back here to you."

"I'm glad you did."

"Better the dickhead you know than the one you don't.

Even though she can't talk to you right now, Doc, when we talked about you last night she told me she thought you were smart. Smart, but cold." He considered this. "Me, I think you're warm. Warm, but stupid. But hey-you're miles ahead ofSolini."

"Are you still seeing Solini in therapy?"

"You gotta be jokin'. Seeing Solini, now, is useless as stirrin' shit."

I tried to make contact with Zoe. Crashing from the coke, out of it from the booze, she said, "Youbeen disdracted 'n' distant," and slumped into sleep.

"Shit," I said, feeling bad about her relapse, and my part in it.

"Sono tutti catzi, Doc," Thorny said.

"Which means?"

" 'Everybody's a Dickhead.' But we're all doin' our absolute best. Even me. Later."

I started Zoe on a detox program, and called Heidelberg East, the Alcohol and Drug Unit, to see if I could transfer her over there. They still had no beds. I admitted her to Toshiba for the time being.

My last admission of the day-which would fill all the beds in Misery for the year-was a 16 y.o. Hispanic-American woman brought in by her parents. Her father was the CEO of a supermarket chain, her mother a pediatrician. Her CC was: "My boyfriend dumped me life sucks I want to die." Such was the family wealth that Nash himself did the admission interview, Jennifer and I watching. The parents were not allowed to participate.

It was a masterpiece of efficiency lasting a mere five minutes, but as Nash finished her off and got up to go, out from her boot came a carving knife. She lunged at Nash. I froze. Jennifer crouched hi a tae kwon do stance. Nash screamed "Help!" grabbed me between one arm and one hook and threw me out of his way and toward her. He opened the door and ran out.

I tripped over Jennifer, rolled toward the young woman's feet, and as I saw Jennifer run out the door I thought, My life is over but I've given it to a worthless cause trying to deliver quality mental health care to this unfortunate rich young woman, and then I saw the glint of the blade and raised my

hands to protect myself and had another thought, which was, Oh shit! but suddenly someone barreled in and tackled her and pinned her and the knife dropped soundlessly to the thick carpet and I was saved.

"Close call, Doc, y'get me?"

Shaking all over, I couldn't speak, but nodded.

"I wasn't fuckin' after you," the young woman said, "I was after him."

"Who, sweetheart?" Primo asked.

"That motherfucker who only gave me five minutes of his time. It took a lot for me to come in here, and that cocksucker gives me five fuckin' minutes?"

In another five minutes she was escorted back out and released to the icy windy night, too dangerous for a mental hospital. I was bleeding from a scratch from Nash Michaels's hook. I put a Band-Aid on. My problem now was that there was one free bed. Two were on the waiting list. I read their charts.

The first was a Vietnamese refugee named Ngo, who, on finding his four-year-old daughter raped and strangled in an abandoned apartment, had flipped out and gone stalking the streets, searching for Henry Kissinger. He was totally psychotic and dangerous.

The second was one Grasci and his lawyer. Grasci was the creator of a hot new NASDAQ hit called Softi Serv, which was some software that linked with some other software and that in fact would turn out to do little or nothing except hook a few more million computer nerds and suburban male obses-sives and make him rich. He was paying out of pocket and desperately wanted to be admitted. It turned out that he'd just beaten his wife silly with a pool cue. His Chief Complaint? "Why the hell was she putting on sexy underwear when we were getting dressed to go to court for our divorce, when she'd never wear sexy underwear when we were married?" He was here to create a legally binding defense.