Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

Then my eyes chanced upon a few papers on her desk: two bills, on her embossed stationery. The first bill was to the NASA grant for Oly Joe Olaf's sessions-at $200 per fifty-minute session-for the month of March: $4,000 and 00/100 dollars. With astonishment I saw that the last billable hour was the very Sunday on which I had found Oly Joe on her couch. The second bill was to Mr. Olaf, Oly Joe's father, "Prairie Home Farm, Tipton, Missouri," a bill for "expenses incurred in replacing psychoanalytic couch and Persian carpet after damage caused by your son's suicide attempt: "$4,534 and 59/100 dollars."

I looked at A.K. She glanced at me and then at the bills, offering me a cigar. Numbly I took the cigar, cut it, lit it, and puffed it silently. I sat back down.

"It's hard for me," I said finally, "thinking of Cherokee. All during your supervision, I never asked him more about whether he was thinking about suicide. Before I started with you, I did ask him, and he denied it. But whenever I brought it up with you, you told me not to ask him directly, that it would pollute the transference. I did what you told me. But

he was obsessed with suicide. He talked to his wife about it all the time! I blew it. You blew it. That night when his wife called me and I called you, you said not to talk to her. Maybe, if I had…?" I stared at her. "I thought you knew what you were doing."

Silence.

"I keep seeing him, how it must have been for him, knowing he was about to kill himself, the loaded gun already in his Jeep, asking his wife Lily that last time, for help-'Do you love me enough?'-seeing her and his sweet little girls for what he knew would be the last time, ever! — and then driving away from his house, his kids, for the last time, getting out of the car, walking out into the beach grass, putting the gun into his mouth-what was he thinking, actually taking the gun and actually putting it in his mouth? The taste of the metal on his tongue? Did he pause? He was smart, clear-headed-and he was really putting a loaded gun in his mouthT

I started to cry, seeing the little girls, the gun in the mouth, being with him as he wondered whether or not to pull the trigger; finally I was starting to cry, thank God! "The gun… the barrel in his mouth, his lips, his teethT" My body shook with sobs, but as I stopped I heard a scritch scritch. I looked up and was stunned to see that A.K. was writing in her leather-bound ledger.

" 'Teeth'?" she asked. "And are you thinking about your dead father the dentist?"

"Are you joking?" I said. She looked up, and then began writing once again, first on the left-hand side, then on the right. "Can't you say anything, I mean, like from your heart?"

"Yes, and when someone leaves they take a piece of your heart with them."

Poppa Doc's line. Do they learn those lines by rote, like child's rhymes?

Then it was as if my vision cleared. I saw her as totally empty, so empty that if I had my old House of God stethoscope with me and put it on her chest to listen for signs of life, I would hear nothing, nothing except the echo of my own breathing. I had the impulse to leap the desk like a net in tennis and plunge a number 2 into her chest.

"You killed him!" I shouted. "You kill them all! You don't know fuck-all what you're doing. You haven't got a clue.

Because you haven't got a heart! You mind-fucker! It's sick, what you do-you're fucking sick!"

No reaction, none at all.

I took as deep a puff of the cigar as possible and thought about throwing it at her, but then I knew what would hurt her more. I took another long puff, until the tip glowed red, and then threw it down on the head of her Freud couch. Ashes scattered all over it. At that she rose and I crushed it in, smushing the ashes around. Then I turned and walked out, slamming the door as hard as I could behind me. It echoed through the barren house like a gunshot.

As I passed the child's room on the second floor I heard her little boy crying. As I passed through the family room, all dark wood and gloom and dark leather and Robert smoking a pipe and reading Town and Country, I said, "You poor bastard!" Robert said nothing. I found myself out on a suburban street.

I breathed in the cleansing sorrow of the rain and stared back up at the castle, its two lit windows-bottom left and top right-like the eyes of a huge warped face, and I saw clearly how through psychoanalysis you could know every nook and cranny of yourself and have no idea how to be with anyone, the seeming dazzle of the self blinding you to the connections with others. I remembered Berry saying once that what we need in the world isn't an analysis of ourselves, but to live with a lot of examples of good relationships.

And I knew then that I had once been in touch with people, with Berry and Malik and Solini and Jill, and that it wasn't inevitable that we are always shouting across an unbridgeable gap, but rather that the gap was in Freud and monstrous fabrications like A.K. herself who followed after, bereft souls floating untethered in pools of self like lilies in sepsis, the gap was in them, not in the essence of humans, nor in the essence of the whole world.

I stared up at the vigilant street lamp, the cone of glittering sleet in the winter night reaching toward me like a beacon, showing me as clearly as if it were the moment's sun that the real perversion of Freud and analysis was to take the essence of something and reduce it to something else-the present to the past, love to hate, joy to misery, life to death-and to do it under the guise of understanding and yet, let's face it, all the

while doing it to escape from what Malik kept saying life at heart actually is-being, without description of that being.

For A.K. and the armies of obsessive scared kids like her, any other thing was better than eye-to-eye and heart-to-heart, anything was better than having someone else see your own sightlessness, or feel your own not feeling the beat of your heart in your chest, or sense your own insensitivity to your soul-anything was better than seeing that you were blind to the essence of love.

I needed to be with someone right then, but the ones I loved were gone.

Were they? Berry and Malik maybe were gone and maybe not. Maybe I could go home right now and call them up and they would answer, and we could make plans to get together, talk, puzzle this all out, and… Yeah, and then what?

With alarm I saw that what was gone was something else. To move toward them was not possible. My mind had been set spinning by A.K., and it would not stop spinning just because I wanted it to. It was spinning in the same way that poor Cherokee's had been spinning-his about suicide and his wife fucking Schlomo-round and round, the needle digging deeper into the groove. Eyes open, eyes shut, it didn't matter-the same record was playing and it was the record of me myself and I.

I saw myself trapped in a monstrous cell of myself, a cell so vast that from where I stood on the cold stone floor in the center between the execrable toilet and hard steel bed, even the bars were as far off as the edges of the world, beyond the edges of my vision, so that even if there were any other humans out there, they were out there out of sight over the horizon, not even remotely close to being in here with me.

Nor could I in good faith let them try.

They were too far away and it was late, too late, too late, not because they were gone but because what was gone, in spite of its bloated enormity and the damage it had done-to Cherokee and Zoe and poor Oly Joe and the kids Oly Joe killed and to Henry and Hannah and Jill and Malik and Berry and my father, caring and concerned all-what was gone was any semblance of the person who had the potential to be with others. What was gone was not at all the opposite of this ravenous self of mine but something else, something