Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

"Great," he said, eyes wildly flailing around the room, "I'm a failure at this too! This is not working. Ever since that day I came in, everything has gotten worse: no sex, no relationship with my kids, no fun-"

Suddenly the door opened briskly and in walked a platinum-blond woman. It was my outpatient Christine, the Lady in Black.

"Dr. Basch-" She looked past me and saw Cherokee. "You're with someone?"

"Yes." She looked dazzling. Madonna hair, black tights.

"Don't we have an appointment at four?"

"Four-fifteen."

"I thought you said four."

"Let me check." I went to my desk, leaned over my

appointment book. I felt behind me their crisscrossing stares, interwoven with their feelings about me, felt it like an electric blanket thrown over my shoulders, set on high. I straightened up and said, "Four-fifteen."

"Sorry," she said. "My mistake."

"Look, I can leave early," Cherokee said. "I don't mind."

"No, no, it's your time," she said. "I can wait. My name's Christine."

"Cherokee."

"A Native American?" She smiled, a dazzling porcelain event despite the glitter of a gold bridge tied to a rocky canine, or maybe even more dazzling because of it-a postmodern smile, a kind of deconstructed dental reconstruction. "Enjoy, Cherokee." She glanced at me. "Nice sweater, Doc. Whereja get it?"

I was wearing the sweater she'd knitted. "Thanks." She shut the door.

"Can I ask who she was?" Cherokee asked, eyes wide.

"You can ask but I can't answer."

"Does she always come at this time?"

"I can't tell you."

"What a knockout," he said. "I love black."

"You have some feelings about her?"

"Yes. I feel… compared to her, I feel ugly." I was stunned by this. He was about as handsome a man as I'd ever seen. "Every comparison I make," he went on, "I come up short. She's something else! But I even feel ugly compared to you."

"Me?" As he'd been talking, I had been doing my own comparison, feeling really ugly compared to him. So I figured that this was transference, a distortion of our present relationship from his past, and asked, "And who have you come up short to in the past?"

"Don't let it go to your head, Roy," he said, ignoring my question, rising. "I'll give Christine the rest of my time. See you next week."

He shook my hand and left. I waited. And waited. Obviously they were talking. At 4:45, a half hour late, in she came, flushed with excitement.

"What was thatT she asked, waving a limp hand before her face, as if to cool down after a workout.

"You know I can't tell you, Christine."

"Nothing?" I smiled and shook my head. "And I thought you were hot?"

She talked about Cherokee, Cherokee, and more Cherokee. It was startling to hear how he'd presented himself to her: a normal happy relaxed young guy coming in for a few sessions of therapy in the same spirit he would come in for a few golf lessons to tune up his game, to find out-his words to her:

"What I want to be when I grow up."

"He's incredible," she said, leaving. "I mean talk about a man with potential."

"MALIK?" I BLURTED OUT.

"Thoreau!" he answered.

"Thoreau?" I yelled.

"Malik!" he said.

"Snhh!" said several voices in the darkness. "Shush!"

It was the next morning. I was settling into a chair at the back of a dark room on the second floor of the Family Unit on Thoreau, my next rotation in Misery. There he was, a high-voltage generator next to me in the dark. He had a basketball. He held it under my nose. "Take a whiff."

The smell-crisp, pungent new leather spiced with the acridity of vulcanized rubber seams-brought back memories of the new balls we Fish Hawks were handed on game days at Columbia High as we burst out of the locker room led by Konopski and Basch, the co-captains dazzled by the bright lights and cheers of the packed bandbox gym. "Ahhh!" I said, breathing deeply, my nose on the pebbly skin. "Converse is my madeleine."

"Hey, me too! Stim-U-Dent?"

"I took one, and felt the familiar minty sharpness between my teeth. My eyes were accommodating to the dark. A dozen people were there, facing a curtained wall. "What the hell are you doing here, Malik?"

Heads turned, in hostile silence.

"SHHHH!" Malik said, as loudly as possible.

"SHHHH?" I said, just as loudly.

"Five, four, three, two-play ball!" Malik said.

Bong bong bong bong bong bong bong bong bong.

A grandfather clock, snaking through a loudspeaker system.

The curtain parted. A semicircle of chairs faced us, an empty chair at each end. We were behind a one-way mirror, staring at the Family Olaf, farmers from Missouri, who were about to have their first session of Freudian family psychoanalysis. Their teenager, Oly Joe Olaf Junior, had just been admitted to Thoreau for doing badly at Simeon's Rest, a special boarding school nearby for students doing especially badly at other schools. Oly Joe, in psychoanalysis with Dr. A. K. Lowell, had regressed to an oral stage, and had been spending a lot of time at school in his room curled up under the covers sucking things, refusing to come to Misery for his analysis. He'd been brought into Thoreau so that he could be forced to see A.K., and so that his family could get involved. The family had been flown in for this meeting. Oly Joe Junior sat curled up in a chair looking scared, wearing a baseball cap beak backward and a T-shirt reading "No Fear!" Oly Joe Senior was in an ill-fitting suit, Mrs. Olaf in, believe it or not, a calico dress. Six-year-old Betsy, also in calico, sat in her mother's lap as if camouflaged, clutching a fuzzy yellow duck.

At the last bong, A. K. Lowell entered, wearing a dark suit in a mannish cut and carrying a cigar. Following her was an anxious middle-aged woman in plain dark skirt, blue sweater, and sensible shoes. This was Faith Baltsburg, a social worker who was a world expert in money anxiety. A.K. and Faith took their seats. So far it reminded me of a daytime talk show, say Jenny Jones.

"They're all transvestites," I said to Malik.

"Ha! Hahaha!"

"Shh," hissed someone in front. "They're starting."

Well, they were and they weren't, because A.K. was laying out silence. The silence persisted. The Olafs looked at each other and at A.K. and Faith.

"What's supposed to happen now?" Mrs. Olaf asked of Faith.

Faith said nothing.

"Are we supposed to start talking, Faith?" she asked again.

Faith seemed chiseled out of granite, and said more nothing, although I saw an anxious flick of her eyes over to A.K., as if asking for guidance.

"Doc, you want us to tell about Junior?" Mr. Olaf asked A.K.

A.K. said nothing.

"I said you want us to tell 'bout Junior?" Mr. Olaf repeated, loudly.

A.K. said more nothing.

"AIN'T YOU GONNA SAY NUTHIN'?" Mr. Olaf was now yelling.

A.K. said about as much nothing as humanly possible.

"Sheez. We come all the way from Missoura 'n' you ain't gonna say nothin'?"

"No, they ain't sayin' nothin', Pa," Oly Joe Junior said. "We have to talk."

"About what, son?"

"Like whatever comes to mind."

"Oh," the father said, "okay." He settled back in his chair, placing his hands flat on his thighs the way farmers will do when there's no internal-combustion engine present and they don't feel really alive. He wrinkled his brow and proceeded to say what was coming to mind. Nothing.

"Faith dear," Mrs. Olaf said, "yesterday you told us that there was hope, for Oly Joe, for him goin' back to school. What did you mean, 'hope'?"

Faith looked like she'd just been shot, her eyes darting quickly to A.K., who scowled at her and lit the cigar. Faith looked at the wall and said nothing.

"Isn't that what you said, dear? Hope? That there's hope for him?"

Everyone was looking at Faith, who, shaken and trembling with anxiety, in a voice devoid of anxiety, said, "And what are your fantasies about me?"