Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

That night I was taking a shortcut through the basement to pick up my beeper at Viv's when I passed STEREOTACTIC BRAIN SURGERY: KEEP our and noticed that the red light was on and the sign "Operation in Progress" was lit. I eased open the door and peered in at the operating room in the tiled cube that had once been a chamber of hydrotherapy.

Win Winthrop was dressed all in green, but for a red forelock thrusting out from under his shower cap like a cockscomb on a cartoon rooster. He was drilling a hole in a skull. His lips were pursed, either in concentration or because he was whistling. I went in. The sound was revolting, both because of the volume at which it sang off the tiled shower walls and because it was drilling into bone. There was a smell of burning flesh and bone that reminded me of my father the dentist. Win Winthrop, doing brain surgery on people?

But no. There is a God. Twitching under the green sheet was a leg, a dog's leg, with a raw lesion on it, licked down to bone, festering. A dog.

Win saw me and stopped drilling. "Go away."

"What are you doing?"

"Psychosurgery."

"On your nephew's dog? On Van Dusky?"

"Gonna make him better."

"But what does your nephew say?" No answer. "Cutting into his brain?"

"Stereotactic. You drill just this one little hole. Needles and electric current and gamma rays. No knife. No blood. No blood that you can see."

"But where did you learn how to do this?"

"Got this book." He pointed the drill at a big book open on the dog's back: How to Do Brain Surgery. Volume I: Dogs.

"What does your nephew say?" He fired up the drill. "Lobotomy," I shouted, "is a crime!"

"The Nobel Prize!" he screamed over the scream of the drill.

"You think you're gonna win the Nobel Prize for lobotomyT

"Somebody already won for lobotomy, in 1949. We'll win it for Placedon and Zephyrill, you watch!"

SITTING WITH VIV behind the bulletproof, at eight-thirty that night, I was handling calls from the outside world, and talking. Rather, she was talking. I was too depressed to talk.

"You are really really depressed, Cowboy."

"You should see it from this side."

"Hey, I have." She smiled and took my hand. "Don't worry, it's just a passing phase. Those bozos in drugs would make anybody feel depressed."

"What are you on?"

"On?"

"What drags?"

"None, Cowboy, why?"

" 'Cause you're happy."

She stared at me, those blue eyes under those long false lashes under that slick forehead and beehive bouffant seeming far away. This may have been a side effect of my new drug cocktail for the night: I'd added a hit of Ritalin to my Prozac. And one of those Placedon capsules big as the class ring on Birol's pinkie. Everything seemed tropical.

Then, there he was, gliding along on the other side of the glass, like a fish in an aquarium tank. "Malik?" I said.

He glanced at us. His eyes were red. "Got the flu. S'long."

He looked pale and gray. His black hair was less slicked and less sharply parted than usual, his face was glistening with sweat, and his white tie lay loosely on his purple shirt. He seemed exhausted, and for the first time ever he was moving slowly.

"Have you seen a doctor?"

He stopped and turned back to us. "Y'really know how to hurt a guy."

"C'mon in, Lucky," Viv said, "have a cup a tea?"

"Tea?" He licked his lips. "No thanks." He floated away, past the edge of the bulletproof glass. I thought about going after him, but he'd told me to burn his number. I was afraid I'd be opening up something too big to ever close down, so I just sat there.

"You two have a fallin'-out?" Viv asked.

"Yeah."

"What about?"

I tried to get my brain to sort this out so I could tell her but it seemed stuck in neutral and I just said, "Hard to even remember, right now."

"Yeah, well it's a bad sign, Cowboy."

"My brain?"

"I was thinkin' more of Lenny. I never once saw him leave the Misery Loves Company meetin' early. Never the once."

THE LONG NIGHT on call had been hard and easy both. Hard for the number of frantic people out there calling in who, like me, seeing the splendor of the year's May, felt mocked, still stuck as they were in the hellish February of their lives. Easy because of my Prozac'd distance from their pain. To sleep, I'd added a couple of Valium.

At four-thirty in the morning I was beeped awake to suture up a cutter on Rokitansky, Geriatrics. I felt so fuzzy from the Prozac-Placedon-Valium cocktail that to start my engine again I popped two more Ritalins as I walked up the hill past Toshiba through the dewy promise of a dawn. The Ritalins snapped me to attention long enough to suture the facial gash of the fallen geriatric, but as I walked back to the Farben I felt

really weird, as if in my high Prozac cloud an alien from the planet Ritalin were speeding along creating a turbulence. My attention was deficient, my perception askew and spinning, like at a carnival when you first get off the Tilt-A-Whirl.

I found myself approaching Schlomo Dove's door and saw that it was open a crack. I looked at my watch: five-seventeen. What the hell was he doing here?

Ever since Ike White had died and Schlomo had taken over the prestigious position of Director of Residency Training, Schlomo had always told us residents that "Schlomo's door is always open." It never had been, so this time I pushed the door all the way open.

Across the room on the analytic couch was a naked woman on her hands and knees, her breasts hanging down, her back arched like a cat, and behind her pumping away against her so that his belly made slaps against her rump, was a naked Schlomo Dove. For a second he didn't see me. She turned her head. Our eyes met. It was Zoe. Seeing her turn her head, Schlomo turned his. In her eyes was horror. In his, rage. The two of them seemed frozen together, a pornographic ice sculpture.

Zoe collapsed on her belly, hiding her face in her hands.

Schlomo, penis encased in a condom and hanging below his belly like a surgical afterthought, jumped up and slammed the door in my face.

A dead bolt was thrown. The door was locked.

I stood there, head spinning, even in the first few seconds asking myself, Did I really see what I saw? — already doubting it. I knew full well what I had seen, but I didn't know if I could bear seeing it, or knowing it, really.

That night I spent with Gloria the head nurse. Glo fit my mood perfectly, as she was not particularly interested in it. Our lovemaking took place in pitch-black, soundlessly, on drugs. I got up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and found that her medicine cabinet was as chock full of drugs as a suburban freezer is with food.

After she left for work, I got out of bed and went to the medicine cabinet. Many of the drugs were easily lethal. I pocketed a bottle of barbiturates-phenobarb 30 mg.-and left. When I got home I took one pill.

TWENTY-FOUR HOURS LATER I awoke from a dreamless sleep, my best damn sleep in the eleven months since I'd come to Misery. It was like that blissful sleep of childhood when one moment your head is hitting the pillow in the scary dark and next thing you know there's your mom pulling up the shade and it's ligfitr

Is this like deathTi-wpndered, searching through the fuzz for coffee.

It took a whole pot of coffee and three Ritalins to burn off the fuzz.

In my mailbox from the day before was a postcard featuring a turtle-one of those bow-legged turtles mat look like cartoon cowboys-being ridden by a girl in a bikini. The caption read: "Galapagos Giant Turtle of Pre-history."

In Jill's schoolgirlish handwriting, all loops and circles, was:

Weather here, wish you were beautiful. Seen nothing yet but trying to see.

Love and XXX Jill.

Who cared.

My father is dead who cared.