Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

"Yeah, well, don't hold your breath, but borderlines don't exist." I laughed, thinking he was joking. "No joke. Problems with relationships, self-image, feelings, impulsivity? We all got that! Your job is to resist brainwashing as long as possible

and just try to help these poor people. Being lied to about Dee's death has got 'em bullshit! All three floors of Emerson are rumblin', ready to blow! Try to help 'em and play sportsl Listen up."

Heiler had left the ward full. Malik said that most of the patients would be better off out of Misery and that we would discharge as many as possible. Given the fact that insurance companies were now dedicated to not paying out insurance, this wouldn't be difficult. The ones who needed to stay, he'd go to bat for. He started dialing a phone.

"How do you get insurance to pay for them to stay?" I asked.

"Allora! Testa di catzo!"

I turned, and then realized once again who it was. I'd just been called a dickhead in Italian.

"Thorny," Malik said, "meet the new resident, Roy G. Basch."

I looked into the eyes of the tall, sandy-haired, baby-faced man. He wore jeans, suspenders, blue work shirt, and bow tie. A row of fresh sutures, like a tiny barbed-wire fence on his forehead, overlay other old scars. I shook his hand. It was as boneless as Ike White's had been the night before.

"What's that?" Malik asked, talking into the phone. "You ain't gonna pay for another day of Mr. Thome's stay here in the hospital?"

"They gotta pay or else I'm dead!" Thorny said frantically.

"Yeah, well, he's extremely paranoid and dangerous and-" He listened for quite a while and then said, "How can we prove it? Well, Ms. Tillinger, he just told me that unless you let him stay he's gonna come right down there to your office with a gun and- That's right, a gun, and, in his words, 'blast them insurance fuckers to smithereens.' Now, where exactly are you located, dear?" Covering the receiver, Malik shook with laughter. He said, "Managed care, I love it. Basch, go talk to Thorny." I hesitated. Malik made shooing-away motions, saying, "Go, go. Move."

Thorny was glowering at me. He walked away and sat down. I felt a strange fear. Malik hung up. "What am I supposed to do with him?" I asked.

"Be human," Malik said. I stared at him. "Human? Human being?"

"But he's so pissed off, suppose I say the wrong thing?"

"Think these people are fragile? Just try 'n' change 'em. But hey, I know you're scared. I was too." His eyes locked in again. I felt a kind of rush, a "click"-he was the first person since I'd been there who had talked to my fear. "Weird, ain't it," he said, "to be so scareda just sitting down and talking to somebody? Image is a killer, and self-image is a killer killer! So listen up, if you need me, call." He squeezed my arm and walked off, stooping to pick up a piece of Utter.

"Dickheads Save Planet!"

"Yeah," Malik shot back, "for assholes like you."

I walked over to Thorny, thinking about how to be human.

"So, Dr. Dickhead, tell me about yourself," Thorny said.

Uh-oh. Surely this was backward-/ was supposed to be asking about him. "I'm the new resident." I felt a sharp pain in my palm. I was clutching my key ring so hard the keys were biting into the flesh. "You?" "

"Got here a month ago from New Orleans. My daddy's rich, made a fortune burnin' trash down Cancer Alley. Calls himself the Burn King of the Bayous. I did okay till I was eighteen, 'n' got sent north to Princeton. Lasted but three months. You look kinda tentative, Doc. Scareda me?"

I was, but I wasn't going to let him know it. "Nope."

"Sure is sad Dee White killed himse'f, ain't it?"

"They say he died of a fatal disease and-"

"Oh, pleeeeze!" he said, disgusted, getting up. "Hey, patients! Hey, borderlines!" They all looked at him. "This new doc is pitifiill We got ourselves a real loser in this Roy G. Dickhead Basch!" He walked away.

Not a good start. If this wasn't a borderline, who was? Humiliated, I decided to interview another new patient of mine named Mr. K., whom I recognized as the kindly old gentleman who'd been playing tennis with Malik. I found him on the sun porch, finishing the Wall Street Journal. We had a wonderful talk. He was, he said, the last survivor of an old Yankee family. Only recently had things gone awry. His golden retriever, Duke, had died. His son had come out as gay. His wife was drinking again, and his daughter had run off with a drug dealer. He'd come to Misery a month ago for a rest.

"You seem so sad," I said, touched by all this recent misfortune.

" 'Tis cause for weeping, yes." He started to cry.

"We'll discharge you soon. Maybe even next week."

"That would be grand!" he said happily. "Thank you for your time."

Time that had flown by. I was excited at this, my first good interview of a borderline. At the nursing station I told Malik about it. The head nurse and social worker listened in. I said that Mr. K. seemed about ready for discharge. When I stopped, no one said anything.

"Ever hear of a mental status exam?" Malik asked. Someone giggled.

"Oh shit," I said. "I blew it?"

"Big-time. Let's go." He led me back to Mr. K.

"Gonna ask you two proverbs," Malik said. 'Tell me, Mr. K., what do people mean when they say, 'A rolling stone gamers no moss'? "

"They mean that I have never been happierl" he said, and started to sob uncontrollably, on and on, in horrific pain.

"And, 'People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones'?"

Abruptly he stopped sobbing, began laughing hard, and said, "It's a big cry, a big big cry!"

"And who's the president of the United States?"

"Herbert Whoever."

With Mr. K. listening, Malik told me that when Mr. K. was six, driving with his mother, a car hit them and she was decapitated. Her head landed in his lap. "At ten he was institutionalized. From then on, because he's rich, he was assaulted by whatever treatment was at the leading edge of American psychiatry: insulin shock, cold water dousings, being strapped into the Benjamin Rush restraining chair and given emetics and whirled around till he puked his guts out, enemas and high colonic irrigations to get it out from the other end-"

"Woo-wheeee!" Mr. K. cried, shaking his head in amazement.

"— enough electroshock to light up Iowa, the most toxic drugs ever concocted, two first-rate psychoanalyses-one for each hemisphere, for the left, Freudian, for the right, Jungian-and a prefrontal lobotomy." Malik made a stabbing

motion up through his own eye socket, and then a slashing wiggle. "An ice pick, stuck in his brainT

Sickened, I said, "Thank God they don't do that anymore."

"Oh, it wasn't that bad," Mr. K. chided.

"Oh, but they dor Malik said. "Lobotomy's making a comeback! Check out Archives of General Psychiatry, June 'ninety-one. Big article proving that lobotomy is the treatment of choice for refractory obsessive compulsives."

More sickened, I said, "But we had a great talk, Mr. K., didn't we?"

"Thumbs up!" Mr. K. said, putting his thumbs down, smiling sweetly.

"Yes, you did. Luckily, they botched his lobotomy. Left half a frontal lobe. Lloyal's his therapist. Fifteen-minute sessions, a hundred twenty bucks a shot. They talk finance. Mr. K.'s trust fund will keep him in Misery till he dies. He's been here forty years."

"But he was just transferred over here to Borderline yesterday."

"Heiler had an empty bed. Empty beds mean stalled careers. He 'n' von Nott agreed Mr. K. needed a trial of BPO with HFL-Half a Frontal Lobe."

"That's quite funny actually," Mr. K. said, chuckling normally.

"They can't touch you," Malik said. "As a shrink, Roy, you gotta be able to tell when something's organic-medically treatable-as opposed to mental. You don't treat brain tumors with psychotherapy. Proverbs can help find out which is which. Read Mr. K.'s chart. It's a memorial to the harm done by shrinks trying to fix people. Now we gotta protect him."