Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

"I'm leavin'," Oly Joe Junior said, slowly uncurling from his chair.

"Honey, please," his mother said, "if you walk out now, I feel you'll never come back."

'To this place? Hell no."

"No, honey, to us." She began to weep. The little girl with the fuzzy duck started to cry too. The mother held her, rocking. It was really sad.

Oly Joe curled up hi his chair once again and fell silent. He and his father listened to Mrs. Olaf and the little girl crying together.

Suddenly A.K. cleared her throat. I looked at my watch. Eight minutes gone. "And is it your fantasy," A.K. said, in a

tone of impeccable neutrality and to no one in particular but rather to a figure up near the ceiling which the smoke from her cigar had formed, say a heifer, or perhaps a hog, "that if your father were dead, you would love your mother more?"

Oly Joe seemed stunned. He uncurled and started crawling toward the door.

"Oly Joe?" Mrs. Olaf cried. "Oly Joe? Don't crawl out the door!"

Oly Joe crawled out the door.

Mrs. Olaf handed the little girl and her fuzzy duck to Mr. Olaf and walked out the door after Oly Joe.

Mr. Olaf and the little girl sat there for a while. So did the duck.

"Pa," she said, "I have to go to the bathroom."

"Okay, sugar," Mr. Olaf said, and turned to Faith. "Pardon me, ma'am, but where's the bathroom?"

Faith was dying to tell where the bathroom was, but a quick, anxious glance to A.K. solidified her resolve to keep this information strictly to herself.

"We're simple folk," Mr. Olaf said. "We don't understand this." He carried the little girl and her fuzzy duck out. A.K. and Faith sat there as if everyone who wasn't there anymore was still there.

Silence, one of Surely They Won't Sit There Till The Hour Is Up?

Silence, one of They Sure Will.

I heard soft snoring beside me from Malik. Soon I slept too.

Bong bong bong bong bong bong bong bong bong bong.

I awoke from a dynamite sleep to find the lights going on on our side and going off on their side and people shifting their chairs into a circle.

"Solini?" I cried out, surprised that the little guy was there, even after his rotation with A.K. had ended.

Startled, he jumped up in his loose-fitting dark suit, shaking his head in a "Don't talk!" gesture. He recinched his Misery tie. I felt sad.

A.K. and Faith entered and sat down and led us with masterful authority into nothing happening.

Malik played with the basketball, spinning it, fondling it, bouncing it twice. In the small room it made a big sound. No one said anything.

"The projective identifications onto the son," someone said, "were not introjected by father or mother, despite their being offered the Oedipal interpretation. The projective/introjective Oedipal Oscillator was the primary defense against the pre-Oedipal dynamic: the fuzzy duck."

What the fuck, I thought, does that mean? Malik rolled his eyes.

The others seemed to know what that meant. There ensued a laborious discussion about this Oedipal Oscillator. It was impossible to comprehend what they were talking about. There were quotes from Freud and much mockery of the "simple folk" who had been doing so badly as a family right before our eyes. Mockery turned to blame. The group was split about evenly: half blamed the mother for Oly's psy-chopathology ("She's an engulfing/intrusive mother"), and half blamed the father ("He's a distant/sadistic father"). Just before the hour was up, A.K. cleared her throat again. Everyone got tense, as if an order had gone out: "Cover your crotch!"

A.K. fixed Faith with a muscular stare, and said, in an incredulous voice, "Your fantasy is there's hopeT'

Faith, skewered, shook with anxiety. A wallet dropped from her hands, spilling credit cards, cash, and coins, which rolled, whined, and settled.

Bong bong bong bong bong bong bong bong bong bong bong.

Quickly the room emptied. Solini rushed past without a word.

"What the hell was that?" I asked Malik.

"Psychoanalysis."

"But that family, they were really hurt. Why didn't you say something?"

"Deft, Basch, you gotta be deft." He sneezed. " 'Mother Stim-U-Dent?"

I started working it between an incisor and a molar. "But what are you doing here, Malik? I thought you were on an elective."

"Yeah, and I elected to do this. I'm the resident in charge of the ward for three months."

"You?" I said. "But you despise this stuff!"

"Yop. Analysis goes against everything I have faith in. Take

every AA slogan, then take the opposite, you got psychoanalysis: Keep It Complicated, Last Things First, Hard Does It, Don't Ask for Help. What bullshit."

"So why are you here?"

He looked me straight in the eye. Behind those tinty lenses, the voltage went up. "Of all the people who supervised me my first year as a resident, A. K. Lowell did the most damage, to me and my patients. She is the worst!"

"Worse than Heiler?"

"Heiler's a sweetheart compared to her. Heiler's scared of her."

"But why? She doesn't seem that bad. And everybody says she's brilliant."

"That's why. She seems brilliant. Seems to know what she's doing, so that if only you could learn it, you'd be brilliant too. I hate her."

"I thought you don't believe in hating people."

"I don't. But I hate her. That's why I'm here. Big-time challenge."

"She knows you feel this way?"

"Yop."

"And she's letting you take charge of her ward? Why?"

"She thinks it shows how great an analyst she is. Thinks she's being completely neutral and nonjudgmental, not taking a stand. 'Course, not taking a stand is taking a stand: that you're not taking a stand. Not responding to a person is a cruel response, an evil response. Nothing drives a baby as crazy as a 'stiff-faced' mother. Like those sweet Viennese being completely neutral as they watched the Nazis round up the Jews. A.K., and analysis, is about as judgmental as they come. When people look back, they'll see Freud as one of the most destructive jokers of the century."

"Wait a second. You may not agree with him, but Freud was a genius."

"Destruction is not genius. Never."

"But look at his discoveries-the unconscious, dreams, childhood sexual-"

"He stole most of 'em. Check out the reality, the facts coming out on Freud now-he lied, made up data, denied real data-harmed his patients more than he helped 'em. The

worst thing is the Freudian view of the world: self self self." He wiped sweat from his brow. "How's that for humility, eh?"

"Sounded a bit more humble than usual, Malik."

"I don't know how you do it, kid, get me going like that? Anyway, I'm here on a kind of humanitarian relief effort- tryin' to prevent her from doing too much harm."

"To the patients?"

"And to you."

"Me?"

"Look what she did to Solini." He bounced the ball. "How 'bout a quick one-on-one?"

"Is there time?"

"Lots. That's another reason I'm here-for a three-month rest. I'm feeling kinda tired out."

"You, tired?" I asked. It seemed unthinkable. And then for some reason I started thinking of Berry, about its being over, at least for now, because when I got that it was really over, it felt awful. I wasn't sleeping at night and was constantly exhausted and wondering should I call her up again and try to patch it up again, but nothing had changed, so how could I?

"Burnt out," he said, "yeah. So this place is a chance to rest See, there are only eight beds on Thoreau, and right now only four are filled. A.K. can't keep patients in therapy."

"Why not?"

"Basch, Basch, you just saw\ C'mon."

I followed him downstairs and out the door into air so January it was like inhaling slivers of ice, and over to his VW bus with the license plate reading BREATHE. We drove out of the valley that retained the ghostly shape of what it had once been-the eighth fairway of the Misery Links Golf Course-a tricky dogleg par four to an elevated green, the second shot over the dank cattails of Schlomo's Outpatient Clinic in the corner of the lake-and then on top of the hill around the back of the Farben to the gym. Malik told me about the Family Unit. It had been funded by a federal grant from NASA, steered to Misery by an astronaut who'd come to A.K. happily married but claustrophobic. Through analysis, while remaining claustrophobic, he had left his wife and kids for a nineteen-year-old dancer and a new red Porsche. A.K. got the grant based on a paper in Anal. J. in which she argued the cost effectiveness of applying Freudian concepts