Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

Machine. Her voice on the machine was a comfort, until she said, "… and I won't be back until Monday." Monday? It was only Wednesday! Without leaving a message, I hung up, feeling terrible. Compared to Chandra-or another guy? a hellish thought-I felt unimportant to her. If I loved her, why was I running from that love? Neurosis City. I got a glimpse of just how deep my psychopathology went. A long, scary night. The next day I felt shaky. A.K. ran a Resident Support Group for first-year residents. I had gone to it a few times but then stopped, because she ran it as she ran everything, saying nothing until the last few seconds. Now, understanding her silence, and feeling that I needed some support, I went. Seeing Solini and Hannah, seeing that "scared deer in the headlights" look in their eyes, I now got it: they too had glimpsed the sickness deep down in their psyches, the big diesels of the unconscious driving behavior that was neurotic. I understood their sense of doom, their need to be careful in what they said or did, knowing that the unconscious was always humming down there. If each of their analyses was making them worse, well, wasn't it what Malik said, that you had to walk back through the heartache to heal?

Of all of us, the drug fascist Win Winthrop seemed to be doing the best. He was always confident and smiley, making

me feel that compared to him I was doing really badly. Whatever Misery rotation he was on, he kept up his drag work with Errol Cabot. He'd had several articles on psychiatric infomatics accepted for publication, involving drags, computers, and rats. His home life too seemed to be soaring. His wife had just had another baby, a second boy, a gender that delighted him. Through some tax cheating and a drag company scam, he was making a ton of money. He'd bought a big old house in a quaint old town and had a full-time English nanny, Guatemalan housekeeper, and Thai cook. Lately, he'd told me, the three loves of his life were the Internet, drags, and male bonding. He was often jetting off to Robert Ely-Sam Keen warrior camps, the latest being up in the wilderness outside Saskatoon with a "tribe of Iron John Wildmen, steaming our balls off in sweat lodges and then rolling naked in the snow. It's the burden of masculinity, Roy. We men are the real victims now. You think white men aren't angry? You bet your butt!"

Thinking of himself as a man who was a victim, Win was constantly alert to being victimized as a man. The other big change in Win over the course of the year was how he'd bulked up. Having started the year fat, now he was all muscle. With Errol Cabot, he worked out at the gym, and had that basted look of a man on anabolic steroids. Watching him now, brawny and threatening, I wondered if he himself was on drugs. Specializing in his defects? He exuded what he called "warrior" power.

Hannah, noticing A.K.'s cigar smoke hovering hi an elongated shape right in front of Win's eyes, associated out loud, "Looks like a penis, doesn't it?"

"Hey, lady," Win shouted, "don't denigrate my genitals! If you're going to call it something, call it what it is: call it a cock."

That day, even Arnie Bozer made me feel that, compared to him, I was a flop. Heilerized, he talked openly about breaking up with my patient Christine, saying, "I'm doing fine, thanks to Dr. Blair Heiler, and to my psychoanalysis with Dr. Schlomo Dove. The thing that I really miss after breaking with Chrissy is the sex." He talked about the sex in a hip, healthy way. Once again the subject was penises. God.

A.K. cleared her throat. Our eyes hit the clock. I could have

sworn she was looking directly at me as she said, "You have failed in your task, which is to talk about your erotic fantasies about me."

I walked out with Solini and Hannah. Henry was rotating in Toshiba. I asked him how it was going.

"Going?" he said, startled, like a man in a daydream crossing a street, awakened by a blast from a track. "Bad?"

"Yeah, I know. Toshiba is the pits."

"No, no, I mean my analysis with the Slapper? I'm one sick dude? I thought it was the fumes from my old man's Ideal Cleaners in Mandan? Turns out it's my old man himself? Five-foot-six, little fucking Napoleon? Wherever I look I see pricks? And I'm only five-five?"

"You too?" I said, realizing that I too was seeing penises. Once you start looking and listening for them, you see and hear them everywhere.

"You? You're six-three if you're an inch?"

"I'm feeling pretty bad, Henry."

"Still seein' what's 'iz name?"

"I never was, Henry!"

"Yeah, I hear he's big on castration? Goes right for your nuts? It's balls-to-the-wall tune, babe, Oedipus City-hang tough?"

"Why are you talking in questions, Henry?"

"Ami?"

"Yeah."

"No I'm not?"

"See?"

"Gotta take it up with Ed Slapadek, the Slapper will drill it out?" He wandered down the hall, grazed a wall, stared at it, and stumbled out.

"How are you?" Hannah asked. Previously dark-haired and hefty, she was now bleach-blond and thinner. She'd even bleached her eyebrows. Rather than a dress with tiny flowers like Heiler's ties, she now wore a beige cashmere sweater.

"I'm bad," I said. "Depressed." I told her about what had been happening on Thoreau.

"Could be worse. You could be me. I'm really really down. I'm rotating with Errol Cabot and Win on drags, Heidelberg West. They're Nazis."

"Loss of appetite?" I said, seeing her thinness as a symptom of depression.

"No, no, I did this for Blair."

"Really? You look terrific."

"Blairey says I look awful." She started to cry. "Got a Kleenex? I'm all out." I handed her one. Her eyes rolled up to the chandelier over the staircase. "Last month at a meeting in Dallas, he was ogling all these thin Texas blondes in cashmere, so I worked like hell to lose the weight at the Dr. Brownburn's Eat It Off Diet Clinic, and I did my hair. I even did my eyebrows."

"And he hates it?"

Crying, she nodded. "And then one of my patients-she'd lost both parents to cancer last year and her brother OD'd on heroin and she was a real mess-but she was doing okay, okay?" I nodded. "I really liked her, and she had this chance to go on vacation, a free mileage thing, to Hawaii? Well, we talked it through and she seemed okay and I said, before she left, 'Have a nice vacation.' And she-" Hannah sobbed hard, clutching my arm.

"She killed herself?"

Hannah pulled back. Horrified, she asked, "How did you know?"

"Just a guess."

"Blair told you?" I shook my head no. "It's all over the hospital?"

"It was a wild guess."

"You think that's the kind of shitty therapist I am?"

"No, you're a terrific therapist."

"Liar. None of us is a terrific therapist yet. We don't have enough experience being therapists to be even adequate therapists, let alone good."

"I guess I just picked it up, from your upset."

"Oh. That's pretty neat, Roy. But you think it's my fault?"

"Of course not. Nobody would."

"Blair did. Said it was because I told her to have a 'nice' vacation, that I laid a heavy expectation on her that she should have a nice vacation, that other people would and why not her."

"You mean you should have said to her, 'Have a shitty vacation'?"

"Blair said that might have helped. I think I'm toxic to patients."

"How's the analysis going?"

"I'm really really depressed."

"Sorry to hear that."

She stared at me. "You still don't get it, do you?"

"Depressed about Blair?"

"Blair is not 'Blair,' Blair is 'Daddy.' " Saying this had a profound effect on her. She dropped to the floor in a faint. Not wanting to let her just lie there, I caught sight of a ladies' room. Picking her up under her armpits, I dragged her in. She came to and groggily murmured, "In my purse… the Eat It Off bar…"

I found a giant-sized candy bar in her purse. On the space-age Mylar wrapping was printed, "Eat It Off Very Nutritious Brownburn Bar." I gave it to her and sat down on the tiled floor with her, leaning against the stall, her open purse in my lap, listening to her voracious crunchings that sounded like a dog on a bone. Dazed, she sat cross-legged, her skirt up to her waist, her cashmere sweater riding up over her bra. I looked at the label. Every ingredient was synthetic except for one: "A hundred percent refined sugar?"