Mount Misery

by Samuel Shem

  Nash was a noted sleaze. ‘Good. Quite a guy, that Nash Michaels.’

  Von Nott turned away and looked out the window at a beefy man clad in combat fatigues who had just started cracking branches off a bare bush. ‘When one is chief,’ he went on, ‘people are always trying to rape you. Not only insurance executives, not only staff and residents. Even Buildings and Grounds are raping me.’ I had an urge to say, The trees raped you? The bushes and trees raped you? He turned back to me. ‘Trying to unionize. Dr Basch, I went to your file today, pulled your papers. Your behavior is so different from your papers. On paper you look so … so strangely promising. Frankly it’s as if, perchance, there’s been some mistake.’

  ‘A mistake in Misery, sir? In a robust institution like this? Could it be?’

  ‘None of this goes any further, Doctor, understand?’

  I did not say I understood.

  ‘Dr Heiler,’ he went on, ‘concurs.’

  ‘I’m sure he does. He wouldn’t want to jeopardize his career.’

  ‘You needn’t fret about his career. He is on the verge of being promoted from Associate Assistant Professor to Assistant Associate Professor.’

  ‘Quite an honor. But then why does he seem so insecure? One of the best borderline experts in the world, and still he’s insecure?’

  ‘Precisely. Blair’s one of the best, but not the best.’

  ‘Like Misery’s one of the best but not the best either?’

  ‘Cut the crap, Basch!’ he shot back, his British accent cracking. ‘Or else! We are watching you – we know all about what you’re doing, even about your little trysts in the on-call room. Is your brain in your dick? Eh?’

  I had an urge to laugh. I smiled, with a sense of triumph.

  ‘If you’re not impotent yet, you will be. Believe me, I know.’

  ‘Oh I do believe you, Lloyal,’ I said, ‘just about as much as I believed you when you told us that Ike White died of a fatal disease.’

  ‘Gonna go back to the house, cut my wrists a bit;

  Take a buncha pills, call my stupid doc,

  Borderline … ya-da-da-da, da-da-da-da-daaaa,

  Borderline…’

  Later that night Solini and Nique Nique and Jill and I were driving toward Misery in Solini’s red Geo, singing these lyrics at the top of our lungs to the tune of the rock-and-roll golden oldie ‘Get a Job.’ We’d come from Henry’s reggae gig in the city. Solini had been terrific – his hair in dreadlocks, his voice full, his body free. When he came down from the stage, I hugged him and kissed him.

  ‘Gay-latent!’ he said, kissing me back. ‘Cool!’

  Tipsy on rum and pineapple juice in the way that it sneaks up on you in the shade, we drove through the late-November rain toward Mount Misery. Solini, wearing his rainbow woolen Rasta cap, was hunched over the steering wheel peering out at the wavering roadway. Nique Nique was in the passenger seat, a warm scent of jasmine. Jill and I were scrunched up in back.

  We parked at Emerson. A misty rain was falling, the kind you can’t help but like. Henry and I stood side by side peeing on the front lawn, humming ‘Borderline.’ I kicked at a soggy clump of brown leaves, raising the scent of earth, the image of healthy decay that would fuel the distant spring. We stared at the big brick building. Over the lintel was a new sign:

  DISSOCIATIVE HOUSE

  With insurance now paying more for dissociative than borderline, Heiler was changing most of the diagnoses. Looking back, historians would be astonished at this shift of mental illness to an epidemic of ‘Dissociative Disorder’ at the end of the twentieth century and draw all kinds of conclusions – correlated with the shifts to Placedon and Zephyrill as the drugs of choice for these illnesses – when in fact it was the clever work of an ace accountant someplace in the dull underbelly of America – Bozerland – coming up with something that might just make his rich insurance boss richer.

  Emerson 2 and 3 were quiet. From Emerson 1, Hannah’s ward, came the usual bedlam, crazed screams and counter-screams, echoing like gunfire.

  We stared as if at a war memorial. We were finally done with Heiler.

  Not quite, for who should come out of the main door but Heiler and Hannah. They walked down the granite steps and headed toward his BMW. Hannah was talking to him passionately, pleading with him. He just kept on walking, those stick legs almost kicking her aside. At his car, as he raised his key to shoot the lock, she got between him and the door, blocking the infrared ray gun. He stepped back and tried to shoot around her. She blocked him again, standing in his way and gesturing to him, both palms up and shaking as if weighing two fruits. He shook his head no and went up on his toes to try to shoot down past her. At that she leaped up at him, threw herself upon him, but he seemed to turn even more rigid, and say something to her that caused her to go limp. She slid down him to the ground, like snow sliding off a mountain. Heiler stepped gingerly out of the ring of her arms, aimed his key and shot his car, which answered with a cheery chirp. He got in, turned on the ignition – soothing music came on – backed away from her, and drove off.

  ‘She’s been like gettin’ it on with him?’ Solini asked.

  ‘In Kuala Lumpur?’

  The four of us went to Hannah. She was lying in a puddle, weeping.

  ‘He called me a borderline,’ she cried out. ‘BPO with SM.’

  ‘Sado-Masochism?’ Henry asked.

  ‘Survivor Mentality! My parents survived Auschwitz. What’ll I do?’

  ‘Please don’t lie there in the wet,’ I said. ‘C’mon.’

  We helped her up. Her legs and arms seemed stiff. A stick figure.

  ‘When did this start, Hannah-babe?’

  ‘After the first conference on Mary Megan.’

  ‘When he humiliated you?’

  ‘Ed Slapadek, my analyst, said humiliation was good, a good good thing, and would make my SELF strong. But Blair called me a … a borderline!’

  ‘Takes one to know one, babe,’ Solini said. ‘Tell him that.’

  ‘Maybe, honey,’ Jill said, ‘you should give him up.’

  ‘Ed Slapadek said that would be a cop-out. Prove my SELF weak.’ She started crying again. But soon the chill sank in, and it seemed to sober her. Calmly, she said, ‘Please don’t tell anyone. Please?’

  ‘But we’re worried about you, Hannah,’ I said.

  ‘Oh I’m OK. Just got a little hysterical. Billy ben Lube would die if he found out. And I wouldn’t want to damage Blair’s career. Promise?’

  Solini and I rolled our eyes, shrugged, and promised.

  ‘Good night.’ She walked through the mist to a new BMW of her own.

  ‘Quelle malchance,’ Nique Nique said, ‘quelle femme malheureux!’

  Winding down, we wandered around and found ourselves on the top floor of the research building, looking through the long glass window over the other buildings of Misery, the faint glow of the faraway city reflecting off the underside of clouds, lighting up a dark hint of mountains. I stood with my arms around Jill, my hands clasped on her tummy, her head in the crook of my neck. Henry and Nique Nique were humming nearby. The scent of formalin. Many jars like those used for canning fruit, but larger. In each jar was a brain. We realized we were in the vault of the Misery Brain Bank.

  ‘Yeck!’ I said, feeling squeamish. ‘Let’s go.’

  ‘My mother’s brain is here somewhere,’ Jill said. ‘That’s why I came here to work. She was manic-depressive, here for years. It really helped her a lot. My dad and I used to call this place “Heaven on the Hill.”’

  I stared hard at a brain resting by its stem in a jar, marveling at the intricacy of the convolutions, the sulci and gyri, the arteries and nerves, at the emptiness of it now and the irony of its donating itself to science, given what I knew of the artlessness of brain reps like Errol and Win.

  ‘Hey, Roy,’ Solini called, holding a jar up to the light. ‘Look.’

  We gathered around. The jar had a brain that seemed pinker than most.

&n
bsp; The label read: SCORATO, MARY MEGAN.

  Drenched, Jill and I climbed the flights to my apartment and stripped to our underwear. At first our lips on each other’s were cold. We lay side by side on the bed in the turret, hearing the rain drum on the copper dome above. As I lay there the room began to spin, from all the rum in my cerebellum. I put a foot down on the floor. Next thing I knew Jill was lying on top of me, her back on my front. Then she was reaching around under her rump for my underpants, helping me to slip them off.

  … Florida is great and with great weather. We were at a dinner dance at the club last night and it was very nice. My new woods are great and they have a low swing weight …

  With a severe contortion of all of our legs, the underpants were dangling off my ankle, her purple satin ones off hers.

  ‘Look, Roy. This would be me as a boy!’

  I peered over her neck and saw, rising from between her legs, my penis. I reached to her back to unhook her bra but couldn’t do it, and then realized it was a front hook. Away the halves fell like, yes, cleft hemispheres of a brain. I rolled those plump grapes. We both sighed.

  … which is the new theory and that low swing weight means club head speed will rise …

  With a twist Jill eased me in and led one of my hands away from her boob to the tiny sailor standing in the prow of that furry rowboat, I a passenger. For a moment we lay still together, on that edge between shore and water, enticed by wanting to push off but not pushing off.

  ‘Roy, do you believe in E.T.s?’

  ‘E.T.s?’

  ‘Extraterrestrials?’

  I didn’t know if I did or didn’t but what the hell so I said, ‘Yes.’

  ‘You do?’ she cried.

  ‘You bet.’

  ‘Me too. That’s why I love this room – I can keep watching for ’em. When I was a girl, my mother saw one and told people, and they laughed at her. They teased me in school. I’m always on the lookout for ’em. Whenever I get to a place with a view, I look hard. Like in the brain bank.’

  ‘Did you see any?’

  ‘No, but I’m keeping my eyes open.’

  ‘And this?’ I asked, touching her.

  ‘Open,’ she said, ‘wide open, buddy, to you.’

  … so work hard and I know compared to the rest you will be the best at your chosen profession and even if it is not what I expected for you this will be true …

  In the warm wet hum of us together with the rain drumming not so much on the roof as on us and in us, I found myself thinking of my time so far in Misery where if you tell the truth they kill you and if you face the truth you kill yourself, winding up with your brain in some gunk in a jar in a lab in a damn bank. I’d learned nothing much about how to do psychiatry but had learned what not to do, how not to harm people by using the tired old descriptions of the world written by men whose hearts were dried up by ambition and whose minds were twisted by dreadful secrets they lied through their teeth about like Ike White, whatever his secrets were. Schlomo would know, Schlomo, Ike’s failed first analyst, and why had he failed anyway? This stuff is dangerous! I thought of Christine who was probably OK as OK as you could be with Bozer and Berry who was OK except for us being disconnected and then of Cherokee who I doubted was OK. I had a vision then of Cherokee floating out there somewhere, floating like a spacewalker in the sub-zero black tethered by a thread-like lifeline not floating happily oh no floating in that deathly isolation of terror – but what could I do? I’d called often and left messages, written him notes – he hadn’t replied. The only thing I hadn’t done was show up at his house like a dread borderline, tromp through his stables yoo-hooing, or with mallet in hand and jodhpurs and Teflon cap appear at his polo field looking for a game, I guess I could try that, but what I actually did try right then was to kind of pray for him imagine that, trying to call through that lifeline to him, ‘Hang in, Cherokee! Be well! Call or write a postal cart! Come back!’ How Schlomoesque and what had Schlomo actually said to Ike anyway, that last afternoon maybe that fat little creep had tipped Ike over? And then I recalled what Solini and I had said a little while ago, on parting:

  ‘This is a helluva way to learn to be a psychiatrist,’ I’d said.

  ‘Yeah, but it beats dry cleaning.’

  ‘Still?’

  ‘Are you kidding? Standing there breathing carbon tet fumes, staring up the skirts of these big Lakota Sioux women doing the pressing?’

  ‘Hm. Doesn’t sound so bad right now, does it?’

  ‘Hm. Y’know, right now it doesn’t, does it?’

  ‘Least you could keep your ideals.’

  TOSHIBA

  ‘You’ve studied it and studied it and decided that it’s turning bits on and off! And it’s a BRILLIANT INSIGHT! … And then there’s this relationship with Hewlett-Packard that we KEEP SCREWING UP! … What about this bullshit thing with no definition!’

  –BILL GATES

  Microsoft

  1991

  Seven

  AS IF HALFHEARTED prayer had worked, a few days later there was a message from Cherokee Putnam to give him a call as soon as possible. At the sight of that pink memo slip, my heart whirred on its spindle like a happy top, the way it does when you see something that reminds you of the person you love, the way I’d feel whenever I’d see Jill’s rusted-out Buick parked in back of the house up the street where she was staying, and the way I used to feel with Berry. I still loved Berry, more than I loved anyone else in my life, but lately we’d both gotten guarded and careful and fighting the touch of nostalgia. The sight of her Volvo driving up the hill toward my turret brought less a whir than a worry that Jill, driving by, would see it and get pissed. Did the zing of Cherokee’s note mean that I loved him? Well, kind of. I called him back at once. He picked up at once. We met in my office almost at once.

  ‘I was damn furious at you,’ he said. ‘We’d had two such good meetings, and then, in that one session, you were acting like such a creep. It was unlike you.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, noticing how frazzled he seemed – Eddie Bauer twill pants wrinkled, pullover sweater stained, hair uncombed, eyes tired.

  ‘Nothing to be sorry for. In fact you set things moving again, set me thinking that maybe that jerk actually was screwing her after all. I was miserable, but I thank you, for that.’ I nodded, wondering if, now that I’d vowed never again to use Heiler cruelty, there was something useful in it after all? Terrific. ‘And so yesterday morning at six I followed her to his office.’

  ‘You did what?’

  ‘Followed her there, thinking I’d go in with her. But I couldn’t, I just couldn’t bring myself to. I sat and watched her get out of her Jeep and go in there, but it seemed, somehow, too … just too. I sat there imagining, fuming, and then decided to confront her after the session, when she came out. At six-forty I walked down the path to the carriage house and into the waiting room.’ He shook his head in amazement. ‘Oh boy.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘This … this total imbecile was waiting there, for his appointment.’ As I listened, he gave a perfect description of Arnie Bozer. ‘And he wanted to talk. Like we were pals, he started asking me who I was, what I was doing there, that there must be some mistake because he was next – all in the most sickly-sweet, waffley way?’ I nodded. ‘And in the middle of this she came out, crying hysterically. Seeing me, she stopped, as if she’d been shot, and then ran out. I wanted to run after her but then I heard him shout down from upstairs, and this cornball starts up the stairs and, well, I don’t know what got into me but I shoved him aside and went up there myself. The imbecile fought back, tried to elbow me out of the way so that we both were standing there in front of this … this …’ Words failed him. He shook his head, eyes widening, mouth agape, like a man who has seen a bad accident. Then he turned to me. ‘You’ve seen him?’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘So my first thought was “No way, absolutely no way.” There I stood, with this advertisement for flapjacks be
side me, and he …’ With difficulty he said the word, ‘Schlomo says, “This your lover, Bozer?” And cracks up! This Bozer goes bananas – by the way, what’s with these bananas?’

  ‘He says they’re for his heart.’

  ‘Heart?’ His face turned thoughtful. ‘Father died of heart failure. Anyway, this cornball shouts out, “No! I never saw him before in my life! He’s got the wrong time, tell him to go!” And Schlomo turns to me and says, “Nu, and you?” I tell him who I am, and his face lights up like a kid’s on his birthday. “Oy what a joy, come in, come in.” Bozer goes ballistic, and Schlomo shouts at him, “Arnold, sit! Go downstairs and sit!” And like a dog, he does. And then I sit down with … with my enemy, and … and …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It was quite a trip.’ Cherokee smiled, then laughed, and then told me how, starting out ready to rip out Schlomo’s heart, he wound up charmed: ‘That man could charm a moose into a hat rack.’ More than charmed, feeling like he’d learned something about himself. He’d confronted Schlomo about Lily. Schlomo had responded with the most humble and abject curiosity, saying, ‘Tell Schlomo, tell Schlomo Dove, about betrayed.’ Gradually, somehow, with an implied, pathetic self-denigration, which Cherokee said had really cracked open when Schlomo said, ‘Compared to Schlomo Dove, you are gorgeous!’ they’d shifted the focus to Cherokee’s own concerns about feeling like a failure as a husband for Lily, and as a father for Hope and Kissy, until, finally, Schlomo asked how Cherokee’s therapy with me was going. ‘I told him it was over, because you were inexperienced and had acted like a jerk. I asked him if he could refer me to an experienced analyst. Know what he said?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He said you were young but a “mensch,” a terrific therapist, and I should stick with you. So I thanked him and called you right up.’

  I was so stunned by all of this, I couldn’t say anything.

  ‘And I left, after an hour, and thanked him, and you know what he said?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘“No charge.”’ Cherokee shook his head in amazement. ‘One look at that guy, you know how much he’s suffered. He knows what it’s like. I told Lily about it – for the first time I told her about suspecting her of having sex with him. She was mortified, and didn’t want to talk about it. The only thing she said was, “The one thing I have that’s totally my own, and you barge in and try to take it away. After all I sacrificed for you and this family? How could you?” I was feeling reassured, flying high, looking forward to working with you again, but now, telling you about it all …’