Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

"Dr. Basch?"

Startled, I looked up. A tall slender woman was standing in the door. Her light brown hair was cut short. She was all in black, and despite her terrified eyes she was stunningly beautiful.

"Yes?"

"Lily Putnam, remember?"

"Sure."

"Cherokee shot himself."

"Oh God! Is he dead?"

"Yes."

"Shit!" In shock, I stared at her, trying to see her but failing. She walked to a chair and sat.

"I… I just had my session with Schlomo, and I saw your light on here, thought I'd tell you in person. I know how much he cared about you. Thought the world of you, actually."

"What happened?" I said loudly, as if she were a long way away and I had to shout to reach her.

"He and I had been more and more distant. Yesterday afternoon he came to me and asked, 'Do you still love me?' 'Yes,' I said. He said, 'But not enough. Or maybe it's me, my core ingrato, my ungrateful heart.' I asked what he meant but the girls came in-they were late for a swim meet-I had to drive them. He said he'd be out for a while. I left. And then… I got a call… he'd driven the Jeep to the ocean, out to his favorite wildlife refuge. And… and then… and put a gun in his mouth… shot himself."

"He had a gun?"

"I told him I did not want a gun in the house, and he'd promised he wouldn't, but I knew he'd gotten a permit. I thought it was all part of his flirtation with suicide."

"Suicide?" Suddenly I felt sick. Lies! All these lies! What else had he been lying about?

"As you know, he was obsessed with suicide. Talked about it all the time. For years, really. Talking about driving into abutments and calculating which hotel rooms he could jump from and not land on anyone below. Even though you were working on it with him, it didn't get any better. He seemed even more obsessed about it lately. Schlomo reassured me-I mean that he was in good hands, as far as trying to deal with his suicide, with you."

I felt a wave of nausea. Words and phrases sprang to mind-signs of his secret, which he had never told me, in fact had denied, early on when I'd asked him, before A.K. had started to supervise me. Since then, whenever I'd brought up the question to A.K., telling her that I wanted to ask Cherokee directly about whether he was suicidal, A.K. had told me not to. "Don't ask!" she'd said firmly. "Listen for it in the material." I'd blown it. I felt devastated.

"Did he leave a note?"

"No. Just his life insurance policies, and instructions how to collect."

"Life insurance?"

'Two policies. Worth a million each. And each had the standard clause, that the policy has to be held for over two years or there is no payment if you die by suicide."

'Two years?"

"Was-" She stopped, the reality catching her by the throat. She cried, and cried out, "Was yes-"

"Yesterday?" She nodded, sobbing. After a while she quieted. We sat still.

She sighed. "I'd best go. Lots of things to do." She made no effort to move.

"I… I'm so sorry. I'm in shock. I'll call you. We'll talk."

"We… you and I… we both tried as hard as we could. I was more worried about him the other night, that's why I called you…. Viv said you were busy. That you would call back."

"I…"

"No matter. Wouldn't have helped." She got up and walked slowly toward the door.

"Wait." I went to her and put my arms around her and hugged her. Her short light brown hair brushed my chin. She was sobbing. I was too shocked to cry. I felt the heightened

sensuality that floods us in those moments when death is all around, when we feel that big callused fist.

"Thanks," she said, easing away. "I'm sure you did your best. He always talked about you with such fondness. I'll let you know about the funeral."

"How are the girls?"

"Hope, the eldest, says she hates him. Little Kissy isn't saying anything." She turned away quickly and, weeping, hurried out.

I sat there stunned, going over every piece of the disaster, feeling sick to my stomach at my failure to dig out his secret. "A note comes due," he had said. "Their children need a rich estate."

Terror. I felt like I was suffocating, as if my breath were coming in through a needle-thin tube. I had to get out of there! I grabbed my coat and hat and ledgers and left my office, for some reason turning the other way down the hall, past A.K.'s office. The outer door was ajar. So was the inner. I knocked. No answer. I went hi.

On her ornate couch was a body. Sprawled, legs adangle down, head tilted back so the face was out of sight, the white jaw raised above the slit throat.

Time slowed down. I clicked into real doctoring, found myself at the body, searching for a pulse, hoping for a pulse for poor Oly Joe. Beside his cheek was a fuzzy yellow duck, blotched with blood. Thready pulse. His kid's heart was trying hard. He'd gotten both jugulars, but had missed the carotids- novice throat slitters tend to tilt the head back to cut, so the carotids retract in, becoming harder to hit.

I stopped the bleeding and breathed him and did all the other medical things to save what was left of his life and called Security, stat. Oly Joe hadn't been bleeding all that long, and looked like he would live, although his breathing was ominously shallow, as if from primitive regions of his brain stem. He must have sneaked in on this sleepy Sunday morning, knowing that no one would be around.

My body felt all watery. One of my mother's most powerful superstitions was that deaths come in threes. I had often heard from my inpatients how, in a particular life-inexplicably and seemingly chosen by a malevolent God-deaths had piled upon deaths, tragedies upon tragedies, all within a short space

of time, sending even the most seemingly solid people spinning down to insanity, or, as in Toshiba at Christmas, violence and abuse. This is the kind of thing we go crazy from, or die slowly with.

As I waited for help, sitting next to him on the couch, I saw how the blood had run out all over A.K.'s prized Freudian couch and tapestry, and Persian carpet. A bloodied straight razor lay on the floor. Then my eyes were drawn to a leather-bound ledger, lying open on the carpet. I bent to the ledger and read the last right-hand side entry:

Oly Joe jumps,off the couch, grabs me and rips off my skirt my panty hose spreads my thighs sticks his tongue into me. Then I take his sweet little boy fanner's prick in my hands, cup his balls and…

Below, scribbled in big adolescent letters and spattered with blood, was:

She fucked me so fuck you all! Oly Joe.

Gingerly I picked up the ledger, closed it, put it in my briefcase, and waited.

Soon Primo arrived. With him were two members of the state police. They had been looking hard for Oly Joe Olaf because the night before he had stolen a car and driven to his old school, Simeon's Rest. He was carrying with him an assault rifle and ammo, and had killed three people apparently at random. Two were students, a seventeen-year-old girl and a nineteen-year-old boy. The other was a professor of English literature. Others had been wounded. Oly Joe had vanished.

We sent Oly Joe in an ambulance to Timmons General Hospital.

I called A. K. Lowell. I told her what had happened. I said nothing to her about the ledger. She said nothing to me about anything.

The governor of the state, questioned later that day at a boar hunt on a private game preserve about how a seventeen-year-old boy who had just been discharged the day before from a mental hospital for threatening violence could walk

into a gun shop and purchase an assault rifle and ammo without a hitch, said:

"There will always be people who are crackers, who do these things. The problem isn't not having better gun laws, the problem is not having the death penalty."

By the next evening it was clear just how brain-damaged poor Oly Joe Olaf was, and most likely would be for the rest of his life. His breathing centers were in fact only up to the level of amphibia, and so he was on a respirator. The MRI of his brain showed damage that in all probability would forever keep him from speaking or reading or writing or walking or standing trial. His family asked that he be transferred as soon as possible to a chronic care facility that happened to be located near them, out in the farm country of rural Missouri.