Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

It was a large white box, with a ceiling twenty feet high. From the center of the ceiling was suspended a swing. In the swing, swinging hard, was a child, a boy. He would pump- whrrr-and pound his two feet into the wall-thwak! and pump back-whrrr-and kick the other wall-thwak! Where he kicked, the wall was black, and eroded, as if he were a prisoner who would kick through and then fly through and out and up and up. His body was rail-thin, and his face was demonic, focused only on the spot he was kicking ahead of him. I watched for what seemed a long time. He took no notice. "Hey, man, can I gitchu somethin'?" An African-American man, with keys. I jangled my keys, in the universal I'm-in-mental-health-too greeting. "I'm Dr. Basch. From Mount Misery."

"Frederickson," he said. "Pleased to meetchu." "I'm looking for Dr. Malik." "BroniaorL.A.?"

"Either."

"Bronia's back in Israel. Don't know where Malik hisse'f is. He usually be stoppin' by, every week or so. Ain't seen him in a while. The kids are askin'. Them that can."

"This one?"

"He cain't ask. Not even Malik be reachin' him."

"He can't talk?"

"All he can do, Doc, is swing. Coin' on a year. He eats and sleeps some, but it's a\\ makiri a deal so he can do this."

"This is all?"

"There it is, Doc."

"It's sad."

"It's the worst thing in God's world. There are fi'ty others, as worse as him. Leastwise what they call God's world, you know what I mean?"

"I used to. Good-bye."

A BUTTERFLY NEEDLE, IV tubing, and a small bottle of normal saline had been easy to steal from the dog lab. I had hoarded plenty of phenobarb. For several nights in a row I had stayed alone at home drinking and playing a kind of horrific game, assembling the pieces of a successful suicide. A few nights before I had tied a necktie around my biceps, pumped my fist, and watched the vein swell up out of the antecubital fossa like a lavender pill buried just under the skin. Then I had untied the tie and put it back with the others in my closet. One night I had played with the little butterfly needle, grasping the two cute wings between thumb and index finger and bending them back over the spine of the needle till they touched, readying the point to puncture the vein. Another night I'd laid it all out like a child's jigsaw, the kind where an exquisitely cuddly cat is sawed up into only four or five pieces: the bottle of normal saline, the pills, the tubing, the needle. I'd unplugged the phone from the wall jack and stared at it, sipping George Dickel. So tonight was just another dalliance with the possibility, a variation on the theme. I knew, from all the suicides I'd seen this year in Misery-which, Lloyal von Nott had informed us all in a recent memo, were "in fact slightly below the mean for a fiscal year"-that playing with the lethal made it easier, just as practicing

anything makes it easier, but that kind of rational thought had lost meaning, lately, for me.

Now, as if percussing a diseased chest, I tapped the wall behind my bed, sounding the stud. I hammered a nail into the wall above the bed, slipped the wire hanger from the IV bottle over the nail, ran the tubing down, and attached the butterfly. I dissolved the tablets of phenobarb in some saline, drew it up in a syringe, and injected it into the hanging bottle. The necktie lay beside me. I sat on the bed, trying to cut through my haze to remember.

One of the stars of my Rhodes class at Oxford, a gifted writer and quarterback whose perfect spirals hurt your hands when they hit, a terrific guy whom everybody wanted to be with, a young man who would dare anything and who had by the age of thirty published two acclaimed novels, the last, Balliol Missed, set in our years in Oxford, a man all aglitter with success, had recently filled an IV bottle with drugs and put the line into himself and lay down and opened the cock and floated out to death. Went to sleep. Now I knew something of that sleep. Nice. Dreamless. Barbs kill REM-sleep. I hadn't dreamed in weeks. Seamless. Ike too had gone out seamless, on barbiturates. Zoe's suicide note said, "A smile plastered on my face dying inside." Now I understood. I was living a secret life. Plastering a shrink's sureness on my face, underneath doubting everything. Eating drugs to deny what I was seeing. A secret, double life. Not sharing my pain with anyone for fear of reprisal. Not sharing how I, like Cherokee, awoke every morning feeling okay for fifteen seconds until something hit that he called "Dreadlock!" and a little voice whispered, "How the hell am I gonna make it through the day?" Pop my wake-up Ritalin. Hoist my body to the vertical. A walking illusion. Over my year in psychiatry, instead of living a life more truly, I'd come to live it more falsely.

Now I sipped from my George Dickel, feeling bone tired, longing for sleep, even that curious sleep of death. I felt totally alone. No one was fit to be with me, and I was fit to be with no one.

"Who are you?"

"I'm a doctor."

"What are you doing here?"

"There it is. God's world."

"Why do some people kill themselves and others don't?" Because of this, little boy, this big disconnect. Because of this yearning to ask for help and this loathing of the yearning. Feeling trapped, not wanting to be here but with all the usual refuges gone, even in the self, so that a retreat into the self feels like falling off the edge of the world. Not because of feeling, but of not feeling. Because "because" becomes bullshit. The Big Disconnect. Should I tie that necktie around this arm? "Soul-death," Malik said, "their souls die first." Now I understood. I felt, as if it were just last night, Dee's last boneless handshake, saw his averted eyes. Something had been missing in- "Dr. Basch?"

A voice in the living room, 12:34 A.M. A feather of hope, then fear.

"Be right there."

I hid the bottle and tubing and needle and walked out into the li ving room.

It was Zoe. Her tall slender frame was bulked up by a heavy sweater, and her light brown hair, even though cropped short, was disheveled. Her face was as pale as that ghostly heron I'd seen in the swamp.

"Zoe?" I said, flashing on, of all things, Heiler's They'll even show up at your home.

She bent her head. "Sorry. But if I stayed alone in my apartment one more minute, I'd've killed myself." She bit her lip. "Dr. Basch, I need help."

"Sit down."

"Thank you."

My heart beat fast-whrrr-thunk. I felt wide awake, alert.

"That moment, when you saw me-" She stopped, and I thought she would cry. But then I saw that her shame and grief had gone way past crying. As had my own. Suicide is way past crying. She looked down into her lap. 'That was the worst moment of my life. Worse than when I tried to kill myself. Dr. Basch, I am so ashamed."

She looked up, and our eyes met. Our vision coalesced around the vision of our eyes meeting when Schlomo was humping away, and then around a vision of shared shame, of

both of us having hurt the other. I held her gaze. We were together in sorrow.

She sighed. "Thank you."

"For?"

"I don't know-I guess I feel like I'm really seeing you, and I feel really seen by you, that's all."

"Yes. Me too." I felt a nicker of excitement. We were seeing together. Was that what Ike White-and A.K. and the drug rats too-were afraid of? Being seen! Being seen as inadequate?

"Your face right now," Zoe went on, "is like that first time I saw you, that night I came into the hospital-so open! And now… you're hurting too, aren't you?"

"Yes, I am."

"That bastard! How could it happen? He's so pathetic!"

"How did it?"

"Partly, I guess, because he was so pathetic. Said his marriage to Dixie was miserable, celibate. That whole like tragic thing about his child drowning in his pool. I thought I could help him, maybe even save him-that's how crazy it got. I always choose the jerks, the abusive guys, right from high school I went out with the assholes, seeing the good in them, hoping… trying, I guess, to save them." She sighed, fidgeted. "And he was powerful. Pathetic and powerful both. I felt special to him. He was the best around, and that first session, after I left Thoreau AMA and went to him for a consultation, and he said that even though he almost never did it he wouldn't refer me to someone else but he would keep me for therapy himself?" Her eyes widened. "Do you know what that meant, to me, to someone who had no self-esteem left? I was honored. Talk about feeling like special. So special, I floated out of there like on a magic carpet." She shook her head, as if to clear her thoughts. "He seemed so into me! Put his hand on my shoulder as I left the office, patting my shoulder like a… like my father did, a few times. Tell Schlomo,' he'd say. Tell Schlomo Dove about sad and lonely.' And then, in the session, he'd pat my knee, and then he'd hold me. One thing led to another, like he hypnotized me with love or something, with those weird, slitty eyes, you know?" I nodded. "And he said he'd never done this before with a patient, that I was the only one."