Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

"Thanks, guys, for this." She started to cry. "I love you both so much!"

Her father cried. I felt teary. Faith and the hepatically challenged Mrs. Bicker stared at us with sympathy. The session ended in silence, one, I thought, of reconciliation.

We joined the group on the see-through side of the mirror. The discussion turned on how Zoe's alcohol and drug abuse was a symptom of deep depression which was in turn a symptom of deeper childhood conflicts-our old friend the Oedipal Oscillator, whatever that was. Once her depression was analyzed out, her drinking would stop.

"No way," Malik said. "Never. You got it ass-backward. She's an alcoholic. Once she stops drinking, she won't be depressed. We gotta transfer her over to Heidelberg East, Alcohol and Drug. Hook her up with AA. None of you Freudians have any idea how much damage you do tryin' to analyze out depression, leaving behind a hopeless wet drunk. Wake up, okay?"

No one said okay. What was really strange was the blunt-ness of this assault from Malik, who'd always told us to be deft. He didn't do "strident" well. He looked tired, his energy damped down. Strange. I figured that this attack on analysis would provoke a strong, clear counter, but no. A.K. and Faith and the others reacted to Malik's insults with silence, as if Malik had not said what he had just said.

Then the silence was broken by enthusiastic talk of what else but the Oedipal Oscillator. Everyone else in the room, including poor, imploded Henry Solini, were into their own guesses about the Oscillator, vying for A.K.'s attention, as if, when that clock bonged out at die end of the hour, A.K. would be awarding a prize for "Freudian of the Day." Sure enough, just before the end, A.K. cleared her throat. We all looked up at the clock. Thirteen seconds. A.K. fixed first me, then Faith, in her high beams, and said, with immaculate scorn:

"What the hell were you two doing in there?" A wad of cash

fluttered to Faith's feet, many twenties, one fifty. I trembled, my hands, I realized, covering my nuts. "That whole session you were helping your patient deny her sexuality."

"How can you tell that, Aliyah?" Malik asked pleasantly.

"I can tell," she said coolly, "because she failed to turn me on."

Bong bong bong bong bong bong bong bong bong bong.

I sat there feeling skewered. I had failed totally. Everybody but Malik filed out.

"Ah, don't sweat the petty stuff," Malik said to me, "and don't pet the sweaty stuff neither. You coulda talked more, sure, but in terms of protecting Zoe, you did good. Y'helped that family today. A lot. Let's go. Hoop."

We went to Oly Joe Olaf 's room and uncurled him from his fetal position. We picked up a few other psychoanalyzed adolescents and went to the gym.

My game was off. I couldn't put the ball in the ocean.

"A TERRIBLE JOB with Zoe," A.K. was saying to me that afternoon in supervision. "All year long you've been doing a terrible job. Subjecting her to Heiler treatment damaged your alliance with her, led to her feeling abandoned, and made her try to kill herself with alcohol and cocaine." We were almost at the two-pencil mark. As I'd described my work with Zoe, A.K. had been writing at withering speed, finding clues in the left-hand column and writing the answer in the right. Now she stared intently at the page, like an oracle reading entrails. Finally she asked: "Has she spoken to you about her fantasies of you?"

"No."

"Get her to tell you what, in bed, she imagines doing with your penis."

"How do you know her fantasies about me are erotic? Maybe her fantasies are just ordinary things, like where I live, or what kind of car I drive."

"Those are erotic."

"But won't talking about my pencil make things too hot?"

"Your 'pencil'?"

"I mean my penis."

"A slip. Impressive. You are concerned about inflaming the erotic transference?" I nodded. "Good. But you've been

colluding with her denial of it far too long. Her drinking and drugging are symptoms, sublimation of repressed erotic wishes. You've got to drill them out."

"How do I do that?"

"What's the first thing that comes to mind?"

"Porpoises."

" 'Porpoises'?"

"Came to mind, yeah." A.K. rubbed her eyes, as teachers do when dealing with slow learners. "But what should I do?"

"Put lead weights in your pants."

" 'Put lead weights in my pants'?"

"You do nothing. Let her do the work. We are all just messes, trying to deal with bigger messes. She is sick. You, hopefully, are less sick. You separate her sickness from your sickness and throw yours away. Try silence."

"Silence?"

"Shut up."

I shut up.

"Not now." She stared at me intently, as if I too were entrails. "So many people who seem happy go home and cry into their pillows at night."

I felt a rush of cold air. "But when she was on Emerson," I said, "with Dr. Heiler, she went through a phase of acting kind of sexy when she came to see me."

"And did you explore her fantasies?"

"No. No one told me to."

"So you colluded with her in denying her erotic fantasies about you. You probably even colluded in denying your own erotic fantasies toward her."

"I didn't have any."

"Oh, so you didn't have any, eh?" She wrote this down. "Heiler," she said, with revulsion, "Heiler. See my analytic couch?"

"I see your couch."

"That couch cost me $250,000. Remember Heiler's couch?"

"I don't remember it, no."

"Because Heiler doesn't have a couch. He has only chairs. Heiler failed his analysis. Not good enough. Too much the sadist. As I'm sure you noticed." I nodded. "Good." She

flipped to a new section of her ledger and said, cheerily, "Next case?"

I took out my notes on Cherokee. As I spoke, describing how Cherokee fit Freud perfectly, A.K. wrote at great speed- thirty-four across, sixteen down-with each new clue saying "Good, good, good, very good." I couldn't believe it, all this approval. But at the very end, when I told her about my using Freud on Cherokee directly, she suddenly scowled and said, "Bad, bad, very bad."

"What do you mean? It was great. I can't wait to see him next week."

"He won't be back next week."

"What?"

"He may not be back at all. You may have ruined the therapy entirely. You made one of the worst mistakes in the book: premature interpretation."

"But I used Freud, word for word."

"Because you used Freud, word for word. You can't use Freud. One has to filter Freud through one's own understanding."

"I did."

"You can't. You're neurotic. You haven't been analyzed."

"B-b-but what should I do?"

"The lead weights."

"In the pants?"

"If he comes back, get him to talk about your penis."

"Him too?"

She glanced down her page to about fifty-six across, and read," 'Father loved my jazz piano. I'm a failure.' If that's not castration anxiety, what is?"

"I get it," I said sarcastically. "Piano and everything else equals penis."

"You're terrified of your own homosexuality."

Boom. Dark sweat at the Boy Scout meeting in the basement of St. Peter's Church after the Scoutmaster had gone home, Jimmy Gora and Ralphie Grzyb saying, "C'mon, let's see that kike cock," my standing there pants at my ankles aroused as they inspected and ridiculed me. "Hey," I said now, "I'mhetero. Totally"

Silence, one of, Well If You Are, Why Insist You Are?

And then all at once A.K. seemed to puff up like an adder. Her pupils widened. I braced myself. She said:

"And why are you trying to be such a good little boy with him and me?"

Boom. Through the curtain of metallic rain I heard the harsh chanting of men swaying back and forth and saw the hazy red and gold lights of the candles in the synagogue way down below and a man in black with a funny cap like a pillbox pointing up into the balcony at my mother and me and screaming, "Out out get dhat childt out of chere" and my mother laughing but the man screamed louder and someone next to us hissed at us and my mother stopped laughing and roughly she picked me up turning carrying me screaming out saying, "Be a good little boy a good little boy, Roy, be a good little boy…."