Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

It was like walking into a nightmare, a ring of hell. Filling the ward were forty women in ratty, stained hospital johnnies. Some were twitching and walking. A few were smoking, and a line of women trailed after each smoker. As I watched, one smoker finished and threw the butt on the linoleum. The other women dived for it and fought over it. The smoker turned and

watched the scramble. Her fingers, where she had grasped the cigarette, were stained by the nicotine-not tan, or brown, but black, pitch-black. Lying on ripped couches, some women were masturbating. An old woman was repeatedly taking her nightie off over her head, as if getting ready for the day, and flashing pendulous withered breasts and a scraggly thicket of gray pubic hair before putting it back on, as if getting ready for the night. Several women were praying, crossing themselves, and another was blessing them.

The room was filled with a stench of feces and urine and sweat. Four staff members, all women of color, were sitting at a rickety table playing cards, occasionally glancing at a soap opera on a TV set screwed high up on a yellow-green wall and protected from assault by thick wire mesh. As I watched I heard, "In a moment, back to One Life to Live."

Seeing me, some of the chronic women shrank back, but some came toward me, so that I caught the stench close up. Their eyes were both dull and wild. A few clutched at me, or picked at my clothes like starved but wary birds at a blueberry bush. I fled to the nursing station. A broad-beamed, gray-haired woman, dressed in a plaid skirt and white blouse, looked at me with a startled expression on her wide friendly face.

"Who are you?" she asked.

"I'm a doctor."

"What are you doing here?"

"I'm from Mount Misery, doing my rotation here. One morning a week."

"Doctors never come back here, to Chronic. Except for one other young doctor, a few years ago, from Mount Misery."

"Malik?"

"Yes! Wonderful person. He had us all doing sportsl" I laughed with her. "His wife Bronia works here, on Ironwood, the Children's Unit. I'm Mrs. Kondrath-Robb." We chatted. After a while she said, "Some of these women have been here forty years. No one comes to see them anymore. They can't survive anywhere else."

I glanced at my watch. "I have to go."

"Come back whenever you want. These aren't animals. These are people too." She walked with me through the clutch of insanity to the door. Once out of Chronic, I took deep

breaths of the less fetid air of the corridor, and ran all the way back to Enrol. I was utterly demoralized, not only by the sight of the patients but also by Mrs. Kondrath-Robb's reply to my "I'm a doctor":

"What are you doing here?"

Good question.

"YOU GOTTA DOG?" Win asked me, at the end of the day in his office in the lower bowel of the Misery labs, in the basement of the Farben. A big, aged, Siberian husky lay amidst the piles of papers and journals, licking his hock repeatedly. He looked sick. An old mainframe computer filled one wall, its two fat tape spools like the eyes of a cartoon clown. A desktop computer was clacking under Win's sculpted fingers.

"No," I said, "why?" I peered over his shoulder at the computer screen:

Dogs were sought with chronic ALD for an 11-week drug treatment study. Notices were placed in veterinary newsletters. Dog groomers were also alerted.

"We need dogs for our study, on chronic ALD-Acral Lick Dermatitis. Where they lick themselves silly, causing lesions. See? Hey, Van Dusky!" The husky raised his head. Where he had been licking was red and raw, ulcerative and oozing. "ALD happens mostly with big dogs, like Van Dusky here."

"Your dog?"

"My nephew's. We're sure ALD in dogs has the same biological cause as OCD in humans. Got two grants to prove it. NIMH, National Institute of Mental Health, and Glucksspiel Apotheke Ltd., Diisseldorf."

"Why study dogs?"

"Because they have no psychology. Prove it in dogs, you prove it's biological. Prove a drug in dogs, you can use it in humans, especially kids."

"Kids?"

"OCD is big in kids. Biological. Besides, you can get their brains."

"Kids?"

"Dogs. Coupla weeks of Placedon and Zephyrill, Van Dusky here is better."

"That's better? He looks awful."

"Better. My nephew says, quote, 'He seems like a puppy again.' We count the licks." The clown eyes on the mainframe spun and numbers rolled out. "Win, you hot shit you!" he cried, and sprinted out the door and down the hall. I followed. A sign on a door cried out: STEREOTACTIC BRAIN SURGERY. KEEP our. The room was tiled on all six surfaces. There was a big sucking drain in the floor. "Why all the tile?"

"Used to be used for 'hydrotherapy,' " he said, his words echoing hollowly. 'They used to throw lunatics in here and hose 'em down with water. Back then they knew nothing. They thought that the hosing helped. Fools."

He sprinted out up the tunnel. I sprinted after.

Back on the West, as I tried to catch my breath, he ripped through charts as fast as possible, one after another, signing his name to new drug orders. As I watched I heard screams behind me, breaking the sepulchral stillness of the ward:

"I'm a kernel of corn you're chickens you want to eat me you killers ahh!"

A wild-eyed man was running toward the Dutch doors, which Deedee the nurse adroitly slammed in his face so he went splat against the Plexiglas wall, although he kept trying to rip at it with his fingernails as if it were chicken wire. Quicker than I would have thought possible a goon squad of four anabolic mental health workers-three men and a woman-pounced on him, stabbed him with a hypodermic, and carried him away to the Quiet Room.

Beside me a door opened and Gloria poked her head out to check on the commotion. She was half out of her nursing uniform, going off shift. A white bra, a tiny pink bow in the cleft. Covering herself, she said, "Oh hi, Roy. He's a chicken farmer from Maine. Delusional. Thinks he's a kernel of corn, and that we're all chickens. Talk about crazy. We're using drugs and behavior modification. He'll stay in the Quiet Room till tomorrow."

"Good to know."

"See you around the campus, Roy."

On the ward, the other patients stared after their lost member briefly, and then continued sleeping or pacing or twitching, as if what had happened was a slight petulation far out on a sea, nothing to do with them, and now that it was done,

something that had not ever happened at all, really. Like a child in a night-terror, screaming lucidly at you, who will remember nothing you or she said, in the morning.

Win took no notice of any of this. As he worked, he sang the Scarecrow's song from The Wizard of Oz, ending with the wistful line: "… if I only had a brain."

Finished with his paperwork, he popped up to his feet and ran out. I followed.

It was raining softly, the kind of rain that reminds you of the optimism of tulips and the fearlessness of daffodils. In the parking lot Win clicked open a big, new, silver Porsche and got in.

"Wait!" I called out to him.

"Don't have time. I moonlight at a shockbox upstate. Ring the doorbell, get your first shock treatment. Ha ha. Due at the shockbox in an hour. I bury the needle at one fifty on the interstate."

"But it's about OCD."

"Now you're talkin'." He stopped dead still, all ears. "Fire away."

"What about love?"

"Love?"

"You think that being in love is biological?"

"You bet. It's an obsession and a compulsion."

"Love is OCD?"

"And we're about to prove it, thanks to Gliicksspiel and NIMH."

"With dogs?"

"Y'got one?"

"No. Thank God you're not working on monkeys."

"Yeah, I know. Monkeys cost the earth!" He drove off.

I stood there, the rain drumming harder on my bare head, noticing that I'd been staring at a red Geo. Solini's car. It had been vandalized, the tires taken, the eyes bashed in. Where was he? It was so sad!