Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

Seventeen

'THEY GO OUT seamless." Dee White and A.K. and Poppa Doc had told me that.

"What makes one person kill themselves and another not?" This was the question that Mo Ali, A. K. Lowell's little boy, had asked.

Now I knew the answer: It's this, this big disconnect.

I was not in good shape. I was taking a phenobarb before I went to work and taking two at night. Already my liver enzymes had revved up to metabolize the barbiturate so that I needed a stronger dose for the same effect, the essential feature of an addiction. I needed the higher dose now to sleep. To forget my failures, to try to deny what I'd seen. I was still in shock at having seen-or thinking I'd seen-Schlomo and Zoe. It was too heavy, and I was too depressed to try to do anything about it. I thought of confronting Schlomo, or calling Zoe, or telling someone else, but it was just too heavy. It lay there in my mind next to Cherokee, with all the surprising weight you feel when for the first time in your life you try to lift up a dead body. Deadweight.

There were some successes on the West. If a patient was lucky enough to have bad insurance and got out quick, discharged to a local psychiatrist or a family doctor who had some common sense, things might go well. Patients who stayed any length of time were doomed. The further into the topiary maze of six-drug Marienbad they traveled, the harder it was to find their way back out. Errol and Win killed a lot of patients, in a number of different ways, and they didn't seem to care.

One of the worst drug runs, for me, was Thorny.

Errol quickly ran him through the drug protocol, thirteen 389

drugs one after another, with no luck-what Thorny, in a rare lucid moment, called "Thirteen-drug Mardi Gras." Then, because he had failed drugs, Thorny was deemed "a good candidate for shock." He and I were both against it. His legal guardian, the Burn King of the Bayous, was all for it. So one day, after adding a Valium to my war chest, I went with Thorny down to Errol's ECT concession in the Farben basement.

I expected ghoulish, but got garish. The shock room was like a spare bedroom of a split-level ranch, with silk flowers and prints of red-coated men riding to hounds. The shockbox itself was disguised to look like a stereo receiver.

"They gonna kill me?" Thorny said, lying down, clutching my hand.

"Nope. This is safer than street drugs." "Gonna turn me into psychobroccoli?" I said not. "If I die, tell Zoe I love her. And tell the Burn King that too?" "Deal."

Dr. Miles Wucov and Nurse Wic slipped hi an IV and placed electrodes sweetly on his temples. Then they ran in Pentothal, a barbiturate.

"Holy shit," Thorny said, "what a fantastic high and-" and he was out.

When he was out everything changed. Wucov and Wic, Argentinians, clattered on in Spanish. Cheerily, they paralyzed him with succinylcholine, pumped oxygen into his mouth, and whipped big leather horse straps down across his body. They shoveled a tongue blade between his teeth. Wucov hit the button once, twice. Thorny, drugged up, didn't convulse as much physically as, it appeared to me, he convulsed in his aura. It was as if he too had been made suddenly translucent and one hand of death had passed through him quickly, taking stock for the future, weighing what was now lost and how much would be left, throwing a shadow. Quicker than I'd expected, it was over and he was coming to.

I sat with him hi recovery while other "good candidates for shock" got theirs. He was so dazed he didn't remember what day it was or what month. The thing he did remember was the Pentothal. Thorny's first words to me were:

"What a high! Gotta get me some mo'a that shit! Catch ya later-"

"Hold it." It wasn't hard to keep him from leaving, as his body seemed to have lost substance, some vital stuff stolen by that hand passing through.

But from that morning on, all Thorny could talk about was his craving for drugs. Downers had been his drug of choice. He'd been clean for nine months, but now the barbiturates had revved up his addiction. His insane craving, coupled with his loss of memory, put him at tremendous risk, if he were to escape. Well, I thought, at least they'll end it here, with Thorny a failure at both thirteen-drug lotto and electroshock therapy. Now he fits in the little box for turf to social worker, for Placebotalk. They won't try anything else to harm him, like changing his diagnosis and shipping him upstairs.

They changed his diagnosis and shipped him upstairs. Thorny's obsession with the drugs he'd been given for shock treatment soon got him diagnosed as Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, the newly fashionable OCD. He was turfed upstairs to West Ward 2 with the handwashers and the famous financier who scratched his rump incessantly. They started him on a new OCD six-drug roulette, at which he soon failed. Now, I thought, surely he'd be turfed to social worker, to talk. Even they would not shock him some more.

They shocked him some more. Now it was against his will, and not allowing me to come with him. Thorny resisted with maniacal strength, but six steroidal mental health workers wrassled him onto a stretcher and tranquilized him and wheeled him along to the Farben, where Wucov and Wic did their fandango on his brain. Thorny was on a once-a-day schedule for these blue jolts, and so rather than have to cart him back and forth, they converted part of the dog lab into a Quiet Room, and he lay there between toastings, tied down in four-point restraints, the horror of his isolation made monstrous by the reverberations off tile of the whining, barking, caged sacrificial dogs. They blasted him with enough watts to light up Mandan, North Dakota, Solini's hometown. I took it on myself to be his medical doctor, making sure he was physically all right. Sometimes, after a particularly vitriolic shock session, I stayed with him most of the night. The only tangible result of all this wattage was an increase in his barbiturate craving. When he spoke, all he said was, "I gotta get out, and get high."

All this was orchestrated by Errol, who never once talked to Thorny in person. Errol billed Thorny's father for these daily nontalks at $150 per thirty-minute session. It was a perfect scam: Thorny's memory was shot. He never remembered who came to see him, or when. Errol pulled the scam with psy-chotics as well. He could always claim that since they hallucinated him when he wasn't there, they could hallucinate him not there when he was. As Malik had said, "They cheat on everything: billing, taxes, research data, and wives." I focused my attention on doing the minimum, keeping Thorny safe, waiting until he was a clear treatment failure and they turfed him to talk. My only worry was that Thorny would escape. I bugged Errol about this incessantly. Mindful of being sued by a rich Burn King, Errol wrote orders for incredible surveillance of Thorny. Errol said, "One thing you can be sure of, Frank: Thorny will not escape."

Thorny escaped. There was no sawing through bars with a sharpened Misery knife, no bedsheets out a window, no slow crawl through a heating duct, no tunneling under, no Hollywood horseshit, no. Rather, one of Solini's Jamaicans whom Thorny had jammed with, when asked by Thorny to let him out to get some cigarettes, obliged. Without a memory, without money, and with a revved-up addiction to barbiturates, Thorny was sure to use street drugs, and meet disaster.

It was only after he had escaped that I understood how lucky it was that he had. The next day, next to the cappuccino machine, I found a thick, well-worn book: How to Do Brain Surgery. Volume II: Humans. On a pink Post-it note tab stuck into the chapter on "Thalamic Lesions and OCD" was:

Errol: It says here cingulectomy is the treatment of choice for irresponsive [sic] OCD. It worked on Van Dusky, why not with ole Thorny? Let me know. Win.