Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

other even than any possible me, something else essential for being with others, something categorically else which, to my dismay, I realized I had no idea how to name, or what it could possibly be.

THE HEIDELBERGS

"It's one thing to desire a person's happiness, it's another to deny them their pain."

— BERRY, CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGIST

HEIDELBERG WEST

"They [social deviants] behave like monkeys in the wild."

— DR. FREDERICK K. GOODWIN, FORMER DIRECTOR, National Institute of Mental Health

Fourteen

"… I CALLED CHEROKEE'S wife and told her that he and I had been having an affair. Maybe it was the wrong thing to do, but I was so upset, and felt so alone, I had to talk to someone. A real person, not someone in the helping professions, like you. It's so sad! He was a nice guy, a real nice guy. / didn't care that he couldn't get it up. It was even kind of nice, in a way, him being soft…. That first time I met him I said to you, 'He's too good to be true'-remember?" I nodded. "And he was! He had everything-a nice wife, two terrific kids, money, me! Why wasn't it enough?"

"Enough?"

'To keep him alive? What's with him? What's with you men? I mean it got so that anything I said, he took as criticism- last month he got a new car, a Jeep Cherokee Limited Edition, and I said, 'Hey, that's a great nickname for you, hon: Jeep Cherokee'-and you know what he said?"

"What?"

"He said, 'Cherokee Limited would fit a lot better with the state of affairs.' " Christine shook her head, and reached for her black hankie. "It's so sad… so damn pointless… and sad." She lowered her platinum-blond head and wept, sobbing hard, all that black of hers finally appropriate to the occasion, mourning his lost potential. "I feel-" She raised her face to me, mascara streaking all the way to the corners of her scarlet lips. "-like I did when my father died, when I first came to see you…. God, it seems like so long ago. You wanna… wanna know the first thing that comes to mind?"

"No, I'd like to know what Cherokee's wife said, after you told her."

"You would?" I nodded. "Well, for a long time she said 355

nothing, and then she said, 'Did he talk about me?' And I said-maybe I shouldn't've, but I did-'Yes. He was obsessed with your having an affair with your shrink, Dr. Dove.' And then I didn't hear anything and I said, 'Hello? Lily? You still there?' And then the line went dead-she hung up on me. I tried to call back but she wouldn't answer. Was it a mistake?"

"I don't know. We've got to stop. We'll talk about it next week."

" 'Kay." She went to the doorknob and turned. I braced myself. "Funny, but I don't feel that bad. Not like killing myself. Not like at first, when my dad's diabetes got him, and he went legally blind, and lost both legs, and then died. You helped me a lot today." She looked at me quizzically. "You must feel like shit? I know you won't answer me but-" "I do feel like shit."

"Yeah?" Startled, she stared at me. "I hope your wife can help you, I mean with it." She shook a finger at me, like a schoolmarm. "Don't you think about suicide, or else! I mean it is not a viable alternative." I grinned, a little. "What I mean is that I need you, Dr. Basch. Bye-bye now."

Suicide was a thought, but merely a thought that existed somewhere far away from the cramped low-ceilinged room in which I was now trapped with my guilt and shame. I was thinking about Cherokee all the time. Even when I was not consciously thinking about him I was startled to find him underlying all that I was thinking. My mind would snap back to him, my work with him, replaying our sessions over and over, replaying my supervisions with A.K. about him, trying to understand how much of this tragedy was me, how much was my fucked-up thing with A.K. As Malik had said, I was to blame, we were all to blame. I had learned in medicine that the main way you got into trouble with patients was when, if you were not sure what to do, you tried to go it alone and did not ask for help. This time, with A.K., I had asked her for help, all along the way. But I had been asking the wrong person. Like asking Mickey Mouse for empathy.

Deaths echo deaths. Ike White, Mary Megan Scorato, the Man Who Froze to Death to Sue His HMO, my father, and Cherokee. Where were they all now?

Nowhere except with me. Death was always there with me

now, but I was rarely there with it. Numb, in shock from all these deaths, I was seventy percent there, at most. I was thinking that I was a jinx to Eve people, as if too much contact with me would put them at grave risk. On the lookout for their fragility, I treated them gingerly.

Now, with Christine gone, I picked up the phone and called Cherokee's number, to talk to Lily. It rang and rang.

'THERE ARE NO psychological or social factors in mental illness!" Errol Cabot yelled over his bulky shoulder at me, out-shouting the perverse April wind. "If it's mental illness, by definition it's biological."

If I had heard these words at any other time in the previous nine months of my training to become a psychiatrist, I would have laughed, thinking, They must be joking. But nine months of Misery had shown me that if I thought they were joking, they were probably dead serious.

"The patient is psychotic until proven otherwise!" Win Winthrop screamed. "Which means," he went on, "everybody in the West."

"'The West'?"

"Heidelberg West. Psychosis. The worst psychotics on the face of the earth. Treatment failures elsewhere. Referred to us."

Win and Errol the celluloidal redheads were carrying a lead box filled with tubes of blood and urine up the steep hill from Emerson, where they'd just finished bleeding Blair Heiler's patients in the name of the Department of Defense. Virtually all Emersonians were now officially on Placedon and Zephyrill. The small differences from placebo had been analyzed all the way up to "significant." Heiler and Errol and Win were rushing full-blast into publication in the most prestigious journals on earth.

Win and Errol were manic. They moved fast, talked fast, and thought as fast and dirty as if life were taking place in the locker room of a men's gym. They had been up since five- after about four-hours-a-night of sleep-jogging around Misery with Lloyal von Nott and "Beef Telly, the short, tough Security chief who always clutched a walkie-talkie tightly to his heart. Beef, who Primo had told me was manic depressive and who for the past two springs had tried to kill

himself, first with roach poison and then with rat, always jogged last, protecting their rear. Now, despite the chill mountain morning, both Win and Errol wore open-necked summer shirts under their long white lab coats. Sweat glistened on both men's brows. Their necks and torsos and arms and even fingers seemed bulging and bulky, with that fatty sculpted look that you see only in men and women using anabolic steroids. The thick gold chain around Errol's neck seemed too tight, as did the class ring the size of a Placedon capsule not on his ring finger but on his pinkie. Around Win's porcine neck was an amulet of bone and feather, with a dog tag:

Warrior-Wildman Camp Key West. Do or Die for Keen and Ely.

If psychiatrists specialized in their defects, did that mean that these drug jocks were pumped up on drugs?

They dumped the blood and urine on the lab tech in the Farben. As they turned to race out, Errol bumped into me. "Do you have a dog?"

"No, I don't have a dog, why?"

Throwing me aside he put on a burst of speed and tried to catch Win, whose white lab coat was already flapping, deer-tail-like, far ahead up the road. I ran after them.

The road from the Farben to the Heidelbergs first went down toward the lake but then took a sharp left turn along the stream that fed it, north up a ravine into the pine woods, twisting and turning, up and down, although the grade- always one step ahead of the racing drug mavens-kept going up and up, until there was a fork in the road, and there, on facing bluffs across the scary ravine, were identical three-story stone buildings, the Heidelbergs. The side of each building nearest to the ravine was a massive, five-story whitewashed stone tower, with nine orange-red rings around the bottom half, four fortress-style windows rising one to a floor, and each tower capped with a dark dome out of which protruded a grand spike, from which sprouted a golden ball and then a weather vane shaped like a blunt-nosed fish, or maybe a whale, crested with a tiny pineapple. These were the famous replicas of the twin bridge towers at the gateway into the real