Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

It was musical beds. Nash Michaels was at the keyboard. It was no contest.

'They tell us America is best country!" screamed Ngo the Vietnamese man as Primo led him out the front door and pointed him toward Candle wood. "They say here you have

chance. What chance my little girl have? I kill them all you wait and see!"

I sought out the sanctuary of the bulletproof.

"Terrific," I said to Viv, taking her Christmas bottle of Chivas out of the drawer and sipping. "We admit someone who is sane, and we send someone who is insane and dangerous back out into the world. What's wrong with this picture?"

"Yeah, Cowboy," she said, "it makes you wanna puke."

"Makes you want a law banning men from women and children."

Hannah came in, to take over as Doctor on Call. She'd just gotten back from a trip to Philadelphia to give a dissociative lecture at a hospital, and was distraught.

"On my way down there this morning, at the Philly airport, when the cab dispatcher asked the cabbie if he knew how to get to the hospital, the cabbie said no, so the dispatcher motioned me to the next cab in line. But then the first cabbie and the dispatcher started arguing, and the cabbie pulled a gun and shot at the dispatcher and drove off! So the dispatcher says to me, as if nothing unusual happened, Take the next cab, young lady.' So I jumped into the next cab, who said he knew the address, but after we were going he said, 'I don't know the address either but I wasn't going to lose the fare.' He was stoned, going eighty miles an hour, and we ended up in some deserted park. I thought he was going to kill me! But we finally got there and it was forty-five dollars! And then I got out and went to the psychiatry department, and I'm white as a sheet and I told all of them what happened and no one said anything to me, no words of comfort, nothing!"

"No one said anything, dear?"

"None of the psychiatrists. The secretary did. She was very nice. She said to me, 'Oh you poor girl,' and got me a cup of coffee. She was very nice. None of the psychiatrists said anything. I mean I've taken cabs all my life in New York. There used to be some morality; now there's none."

"People out there are seethin' with rage, dear," Viv said, "seethin' with rage. Everybody feels they're not gettin' what they deserve outta life."

"But this is America," she cried, her eyes rolling up to the fluorescents. "I mean it's not like this isn't it-this is it! This is

normal life! This is where we live! What are we supposed to do? Stay away? Away where? How?"

"You need some support, dear. Where's your family?"

"New Guinea."

"Funny, dear, you don't have a New Guinea accent."

"No, no, they're visiting my sister and her husband in New Guinea for Chanukah. The successful sister."

'There are some good people in life too, dear."

"Sure there are," I said. "Where's Blair Heiler?"

Hannah's eyes rolled down to mine, widened with terror, and then rolled up again like shades. She said loudly, "Shhhh!" She didn't want Viv to know what Viv and everybody else at Misery knew, much as von Nott hadn't wanted everybody to know what we all knew about Ike White's suicide. "You're right, Viv," she went on, "I've met somebody new."

"Good for you, dear. Who is he?"

"He's in the field, a psychiatrist."

"What antidepressant is he on?" I asked.

"I… I don't know. He didn't say."

"Is he happy?"

"No, he's not happy."

"Not Prozac, then. Is he peaceful?"

"No, I couldn't really call him 'peaceful.' "

"So he's not on Paxil. How 'bout breezy?"

" 'Breezy'?"

"Breezy."

She thought a few seconds. "Yeah, he is kind of 'breezy.' "

"Zoloft. He's on Zoloft. Aloft, like the balloons in their ads? Breezy."

"What happened to your husband, dear?"

"We're separated. He's so boring you could die. Now his whole family's on my case. The ben Lubes are restless. It won't be easy. But it's nothing compared to a trip to Philadelphia. Unreal."

A call came in for Viv. Hannah whispered that there wasn't any new man at all and that although things were rocky with Blair and her, they were still very much on. Hannah left to take her first call. I was off duty at last.

I chatted with Viv until Primo came back. "More bad news, Doc."

"Yeah?"

"They found a body, way way back in the woods, frozen solid. And on the body was a letter and it was addressed to youse."

He handed me a letter the size of a Christmas card. I opened it. A handmade Christmas card. Within a crude, child's outline of a Christmas tree was written:

Life

Is Tough

Life Is Hard

Here's Your Fucking

Christmas Card.

Mandy

On the reverse side was a message for me:

Dear Dr. Basch,

My wife Mandy made me this card. You tried hard but Healthycare kept putting me on hold. In my safe deposit box is all the information, which our lawyer will use to sue the pants off Healthycare. My wife and kids will be taken care of. Thanks for your help.

Sincerely, Sedders

"You know him, Doc?"

"Not really."

"Died of exposure."

"Don't we all," Viv said, "in the end?"

"Yeah, well," I said, "we should give the guy a medal."

"Why's that, Doc?"

"He killed himself first. Before killing his wife and kids. Yes, my friends, this man was a great American. I'm off duty. Happy New Year."

Feeling a terrific thirst, I went downstairs into the tunnels and along to the soda machine under the Farben. I put a dollar bill in and nothing came out. Then I noticed that the light said: Will Not Make Change.

Underneath this someone had written: Change Is Very Difficult.

Upstairs again, I stared out the locked front door at the crowd-maybe twenty poor souls. Having been told that there was no chance of getting in, the crowd had turned nasty. Wild-eyed people were banging on the bulletproof glass of the front door. How would I make it to my car?

Primo materialized to escort me.

We battled our way through, trying to stay on the sanded and salted walk, the crowd slipping and sliding on the ice on the lawn. It was pathetic, all these people sick of normal life, wanting in to a hospital for the mentally ill. They were downstream from something. We were hauling them up out of the water, but nobody was looking upstream, for whatever that something was.

My car was blocked from backing out by a small family- father, mother, baby. The father came over to my window and shoved a sign in my face:

UNEMPLOYED EXECUTIVE.

WILL WORK FOR FOOD.

CAN YOU HELP?

I thought of Malik. Once during the summer, walking with him toward a sporting goods store in the village, we'd passed a drunk asking for change. Malik had given him a dollar. I'd given nothing. The panhandler had said to him, "Have a nice day," and then turned to me and said ominously, "and a safe day, you."

"Why'd you do that?" I'd asked him. "He'll just spend it on booze."

"It's just my way," he'd said, "of betting on the Divinity."

Outside my car window now, the man was joined by his wife and baby. I started to dig into my pocket for change.

But then I saw the children, all the children mutilated and killed by men, and though I heard Malik's voice telling me that these were cries from the mine shaft on behalf of us all, I was filled with despair. How could a God, something Divine, do this? Hannah had said it: "This is America, this is it. Normal life. What are we supposed to do? Stay away? Where? How?" Divinity? Don't talk Divinity to me. If you're going to talk anything, talk Hell.

I looked at the man and shook my head no.

He gave me the finger and moved away, the harsh wind hitting him, sliding him back, his legs working hard to stay up on the ice, and to keep his wife and baby up too.

The sun was a red teardrop in the notch of a mountain, leaving a darkness over our low hill. As I pulled away, the klieg lights went on. The crowd, somehow beaten down by them, shrank back from the front door. Illuminated over the portico was brand-new graffiti, spray-painted hi Day-Glo orange: