Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

Now something in me cracked open, calling into question

who and what I could believe, or not believe. With Ike, I had believed in my own experience of him, and it was totally false. The ground under my feet took on the feel of gauze, the heat made my head spin. I said to Henry:

"But I thought psychiatrists are supposed to be able to face the hard feelings, help you get through them, you know, alive?'

"No joke, man. Maybe they're trying to teach us that we're better off mentally if we pretend mat what really happened didn't really happen. That we don't feel what we do feel?"

"But if you can't even keep the doctors from killing themselves," I said, "how the hell can you keep the patients from killing themselves too?"

Henry scrunched up his face in puzzlement. "Good question man, yeah."

"I feel so bad," Hannah said, rolling her eyes up toward the sky. She often did this eye roll-up when she spoke. One day when I'd asked her about it, she was surprised that she still was doing it, and explained that it came from her being in psychoanalysis for so many years. She'd gotten into the habit, from lying there on the couch with her analyst behind her, of looking back toward him whenever she said anything she thought he'd think she should think was important. "I came here to work with Ike, and when I asked him to be my teacher, he said…" She started to cry, so that Ike's words came out in a kind of wail, " 'Nothing would make me happier.' "

Emerson's high walls and locked doors seemed sinister. On the first floor, Hannah unlocked the door to her ward, Emerson 1, Depression. Solini left me on the second-floor landing and continued up to his ward, Emerson 3, Psychosis. Noting the Split Risk sign, I opened the door to my new ward, Emerson 2, Borderline, with caution, shielded the opening with my body, back-flipped in fast and threw the door closed. It shut with a tremendous whaml

"Dickheads Slam Doors!"

The same sandy-haired young man as before. I went into a slow burn, wanting to respond, but stopping myself. About twenty other patients were sitting around the living room, staring at me. I saw the two tennis players. The normal, older man, in a crisp summer suit, was reading the Wall Street Journal. The younger, thin man-the manic one-was reading

a tabloid and eating a carrot. He took a bite. In the tense silence the crunch seemed enormous. No doctors were in sight. The patients-teen to senior citizen, dressed from high fashion to rags, many with bandages around their wrists or heads or legs, one in a neck brace riveted into her skull, one in a wheelchair-seemed like so many wounded, shell-shocked refugees, waiting for a war to end so they could move on. These were the dread "borderlines."

I asked the ward secretary where I could find Dr. Malik.

"The one with the carrot. Hall meetin's just about over."

This was a surprise. I stood and watched. He was speaking:

"Like I said, Ike White killed himself. Nobody knows why. Hard to take. But we gotta face reality. Game's over for him, but not for us. I'm here. You wanna talk suicide, I'll talk suicide. But do sports! Catch ya later."

Malik walked over to us. He was wearing a short-sleeve white shirt and a slender red tie, khaki trousers, and well-worn Nike running shoes. His wiry athlete's body seemed too small a container for his energy. He had jet-black hair, parted carefully and slicked up and over in front. In his long tan face, his hawk's nose was bridged by black-framed glasses whose lenses were tinted amber. We shook hands. His was large for his size, and, though tight with tendons, gentle. An athlete's hand.

"I saw you playing tennis yesterday. I thought you were a patient."

"So y'think there's a big difference between doctors and patients? Sometimes your patients are better than you." He fixed me with his eyes. I had a strange sense of being seen into. He glanced at my suit. "Boy, you got it bad."

"What do you mean?"

"You know what I mean, doncha?"

"Sort of," I said, sensing him sensing my discomfort wearing a suit.

"So if you know what I mean, you don't ask what I mean. To be a shrink you still got a lot to unlearn, like all us kids who went to med school. 'Specially us hot-shit high-achiever Jews."

I wanted to ask what he meant but stopped myself.

"You stopped yourself. Good." He took another bite out of his carrot, closed his eyes and chewed carefully, savoring it.

"What's with the carrot?"

"A carrot a day keeps colon cancer away." I laughed. "No joke. Studies have proved it."

"And just where is it you put the carrot?"

"Ha! Haha! Good. So. You play any sports?"

'Tennis, basketball, and golf."

"You do okay in psychiatry as long as you keep playing sports and use what you know from sports. Anything else before I show you what's what?"

"I was surprised you told them the truth about Ike White. I've been trying to figure out what von Nott meant by 'a fatal disease.' "

"That's bullshit. Lloyal means he was biologically depressed, but depression never has to be fetal. Never. All Ms fatal-disease bullshit is so they don't have to admit they killed him."

"They killed him?"

"Places like this kill guys like him right and left, and a lot of the dead don't even know when they're dead 'cause their souls die first."

"That seems pretty bitter — " I started to say, but then stopped, for Malik had tears hi his eyes, amber-tinted wetness. One tear, escaping from under his glasses, ran down his cheek, translucent, losing form as it ran, leaving a trace behind, like a snail's. Looking away, he chomped his carrot mournfully, giving out several forlorn crunches. He gulped down sobs, his Adam's apple shuttling up and down his dun neck. I asked, "You must've known Dee really well?"

"Nobody knew Ike well." He removed his glasses, squinted like a mole in the light, and wiped away the tears with the back of his hand. "Nobody alive knows a suicide at all."

"Why'd he kill himself? Is there some dirt, some secret? Why?"

"Maybe, maybe not. 'Why' questions don't work too good in psychiatry. What can I tell you? Psychiatrists specialize in their defects."

"And Ike specialized in suicide?"

"Wrote the classic papers, yop. Maybe we'll find out more, with time, and the more you find out about a person, the more sense they make, never less. Lloyal was crushing nun. He died

of death." He blinked, looked around in puzzlement. "Why'm I preaching to you? Jesus! C'mon-"

"Wait." He waited. "If the other shrinks are lying about him killing himself, and you're telling the truth, aren't you gonna get into trouble?"

"So what else is new? They don't like me teaching you new guys, 'specially not here on Blair Heiler's ward. Eleven months of the year Heiler terrorizes these patients, so nobody else wants to deal with the mess in August when he's on vacation in Stockholm. Sucking Nobel Prize butt."

'Terrorizes!"

"Yop. So. Emerson Two. Know anything about it?" "It's the borderline ward," I said. Ike had given me a lecture on borderlines, patients who were on the border between normals-or neurotics-and crazies-or psychotics. The lecture was based on the DSM-the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual-the bible of psychiatric diagnosis published by the prestigious American Psychiatric Association. The DSM described borderlines as suffering from a pervasive instability in interpersonal relationships, self-image, and feelings. The official diagnosis of Borderline Personality Organization, or BPO, was defined by thirteen Krotkey Factors, created by the borderline world expert Dr. Renaldo Krotkey. Dr. Blair Heiler, local borderline expert, was a follower of Krotkey. Some of the Krotkey Factors were: impulsivity (BPOs were dramatically impulsive about sex, shopping, gambling, substance abuse, reckless driving, binge eating, etc.), fear of abandonment, unstable relationships, suicidal or self-mutilating acts, mood swings, feelings of emptiness, and a fierce, withering rage. Borderlines were emotionally labile, sometimes seeming completely normal, sometimes really crazy. They could change in an instant, seemingly for no dear reason. Most borderlines were women. Dee had painted me a dire picture, and now I quoted Dee to Malik, "Borderlines are hell. They make your life as a psychiatrist miserable. They're almost impossible to treat. Borderlines are the worst patients in all of psychiatry."