Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

I had no idea what I could do about any of this. I buried my care in silence. You'd have to have a heart of stone, to see all this and not feel it. I was not feeling it much. My heart may well have been stone. I had told no one about my seeing Schlomo fucking Zoe. Since then I'd begun to doubt myself even more. Did I really see what I saw? Could there be some

other explanation? Fatigue? Side effect of one of the drugs I was on? Could it have been not Zoe but a Zoe look-alike whom Schlomo had been dating without the Barracuda's knowledge?

But of course seeing Zoe being fucked by Schlomo in therapy made me realize that in all likelihood Lily Putnam was being fucked by Schlomo in therapy too. Cherokee had even imagined the same position I'd seen: doggie style. I knew that I should do something about it, but what? I had to talk to Lily, but she was still too wigged out to talk. So far it was my word against his, and I was enervated totally from being on barbiturates. Everything was an effort. My fuzz made it harder to think and to act.

Then one day I forced myself to go to my Outpatient Team Meeting, in the clinic at the swampy, sulfur-scented end of the sausage-shaped lake. I watched from behind a one-way mirror as Schlomo did his "down and dirty" shtick as the leader of an outpatient group therapy. After the group was over I filed in with the rest of the Outpatient Team for discussion, and watched Schlomo do his up-on-his-tippy-toes dance of celebration of himself as the mensch of psychotherapy.

I said nothing, sizing up my enemy. His piggy slits of eyes seemed to be avoiding mine. By the end of the session my heart was racing. The pulse in my temporal arteries cut through my barbiturate fog like the bell on a buoy. To wake up I ate a Ritalin. I followed him out and waited as his disciples peeled off gradually to their own offices. I found myself standing behind him as he unlocked his office door in the Farben, the door I had opened to my glimpse of hell. He turned and saw me standing facing him.

"Royala!" he cried out happily, as if we were old friends. "Nu?"

"I've got to talk to you."

"Schlomo is delighted."

I followed him in. Bananas were everywhere, in various stages of decay. I faced him, again dazzled by the actuality of his ugliness. Doubt rolled in, crashed over.

"I–I-" I stammered. "What I saw you doing, when I came in here that morning, with my patient Zoe…"

"You came in here with your patient Zoe?"

"No, no, I opened the door, and you were with Zoe."

"You came in here?"

"You know I did. You were… having intercourse with Zoe."

"What?" he said.

"Fucking her. I saw you having sexual intercourse with my patient Zoe."

His eyes widened from their porcine slits and his jaw dropped as if the jowls had gotten just too heavy for the fat-ridden masseters and buccinators. His teeth looked fierce, and I spotted a clumsily capped incisor and a badly rotated bicuspid. "What?" he cried out again. "Schlomo Dove having-look, Schlomo can hardly mouth the words-sex with a patient?"

"Yes. I saw it. I'm going to do something about it It'll be easier if you admit it."

His eyes narrowed again. The masseters not only pulled that jaw back up but clenched, wobbling those cheeks, those jowls. His mouth closed hard, to a line. "You never came in here. You never saw Schlomo with a patient in here."

"I know what I saw."

"No you don't. Schlomo's door is always closed and locked. The consulting chamber is a sacred place. A safe place for one and all."

"I saw it. And I believe, now, that you've been fucking Lily Putnam too."

"You are confused, Roy Basch. Confused and deeply deeply depressed."

I felt an enormous weight, as if he were a block of strange metal emitting particulate metal from those eyes, that mouth, coating me, confusing me with weight, pressing out of me anything I might know for sure. The full weight of accusing him, the top analyst in town, one of the guys who matched tens of thousands of poor souls to other analysts, came down on me. I tried to speak. My tongue had gone metallic, it was too heavy to move.

"Roy," he said in a kindly tone, "to have a father die, and a patient die, all in the same month? Who wouldn't be depressed and confused? Why, no one wouldn't, no one wouldn't at all. You'd be crazy if you weren't, right? Schlomo understands. Now, Schlomo has another patient waiting. Good-bye, Roy, and be well."

My body felt as heavy as a dead man's. I got out.

I NEEDED HELP. Who could I ask?

That's the hooker, I thought, over and over when I roused myself from my despair and lethargy to think at all-who could I ask? It was astonishing to me that in almost a year in Mount Misery, surrounded by people who were allegedly the ones you would most want to go to to ask for help with your despair, I could think of only two people I could turn to: Berry and Malik. Berry seemed too risky. "Ask!" Malik had made us say. It had to be Malik. But he'd told me to burn his phone number. Could I call him?

One rainy evening a couple of days later, after finishing up with my patient Christine, who was responding to Prozac and Ritalin by not obsessing as much about Cherokee's suicide, I phoned Malik at home.

No answer. No tape. Strange.

Maybe because of my depressed haziness I had the thought that this meant he must be with his wife over on Ironwood, the Child Unit at Candlewood State Hospital. I climbed down from my office in Toshiba and walked toward my old Mustang, but I'd been eating more phenobarbs and my feet weren't making great contact with the ground and the cool wet drizzle felt so good on my feverish dull face that I decided to hike through the swamp to Candlewood.

It was one of those damp cool dusks where you can't tell if it feels ominous because winter is coming or liberating because it's about to be summer. The damp cool felt good. Leaving Misery was always easier than entering, and I moved quickly downhill and then farther downhill to the long straightaway through the marshland. The road was two-lane only, a rarity, and soon on either side as far as the eye could see there was nothing of civilization, for the land was too wet to build on, and by some miracle in these rapacious times, still too protected to drain. The lowland, set in a natural bowl of hills with thinning forests, was misty and hazy like the inside of my head. In the marsh there were no real trees, but bushes and cattails and swamp grass, last year's brown mixed with this year's green. The smell of skunk cabbage hit me, sharply as smelling salts, and opened my eyes wide.

The dim sunset was reflected in jagged pieces of pooled water, broken by hummocks. The only sounds were my feet on the blacktop-the reassuring thunk thunk reminding me of my many other solitary walks over the years, from Aranmore off the west Irish coast to Buyukada south of Istanbul in the Sea of Marmara, from the thin ancient paths boxing the rice paddies at Mao's birthplace near Changsha to the Cotswolds, where I'd spent years alone learning not to be lonely-I'd thought, at the time, for good.

Deeper inXo the swamp \ heard birds, and saw, like a ghost or a goddess, a lone white heron, beak poised like a sword, still as my father's face in death. I could have sworn I heard a flute, and stopped, still. Lonely lilting notes tore up from the far edge of the marsh, seemingly from one direction, then another, sad, desolate notes, held long, moving not in major steps but in chromatic elisions, making me feel cold and sorrowful. I hurried on.

In the wasteland of the state facility I skirted the main building, feeling guilty remembering my trip to Women's Chronic 9, for I had never been back. Ironwood, the Children's Unit, was a lone brick building on a small hill in the back. I used my keys and entered. A pounding came at me, rhythmic, through a wall: Whrrr-thwak! Whrrr-thwak! I searched out the door to this room and went in.