Mount Misery

by Samuel Shem

Hannah’s eyes rolled down to mine, widened with terror, and then rolled up again like shades. She said loudly, ‘Shhhh!’ She didn’t want Viv to know what Viv and everybody else at Misery knew, much as von Nott hadn’t wanted everybody to know what we all knew about Ike White’s suicide. ‘You’re right, Viv,’ she went on, ‘I’ve met somebody new.’

  ‘Good for you, dear. Who is he?’

  ‘He’s in the field, a psychiatrist.’

  ‘What antidepressant is he on?’ I asked.

  ‘I … I don’t know. He didn’t say.’

  ‘Is he happy?’

  ‘No, he’s not happy.’

  ‘Not Prozac, then. Is he peaceful?’

  ‘No, I couldn’t really call him “peaceful.”’

  ‘So he’s not on Paxil. How ’bout breezy?’

  ‘“Breezy.”’

  She thought a few seconds. ‘Yeah, he is kind of “breezy.”’

  ‘Zoloft. He’s on Zoloft. Aloft, like the balloons in their ads? Breezy.’

  ‘What happened to your husband, dear?’

  ‘We’re separated. He’s so boring you could die. Now his whole family’s on my case. The ben Lubes are restless. It won’t be easy. But it’s nothing compared to a trip to Philadelphia. Unreal.’

  A call came in for Viv. Hannah whispered that there wasn’t any new man at all and that although things were rocky with Blair and her, they were still very much on. Hannah left to take her first call. I was off duty at last.

  I chatted with Viv until Primo came back. ‘More bad news, Doc.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘They found a body, way way back in the woods, frozen solid. And on the body was a letter and it was addressed to youse.’

  He handed me a letter the size of a Christmas card. I opened it. A handmade Christmas card. Within a crude, child’s outline of a Christmas tree was written:

  Life

  Is Tough

  Life Is Hard

  Here’s Your Fucking

  Christmas Card.

  Mandy

  On the reverse side was a message for me:

  Dear Dr Basch,

  My wife Mandy made me this card. You tried hard but Healthycare kept putting me on hold. In my safe deposit box is all the information, which our lawyer will use to sue the pants off Healthycare. My wife and kids will be taken care of. Thanks for your help.

  Sincerely,

  Sedders

  ‘You know him, Doc?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Died of exposure.’

  ‘Don’t we all,’ Viv said, ‘in the end?’

  ‘Yeah, well,’ I said, ‘we should give the guy a medal.’

  ‘Why’s that, Doc?’

  ‘He killed himself first. Before killing his wife and kids. Yes, my friends, this man was a great American. I’m off duty. Happy New Year.’

  Feeling a terrific thirst, I went downstairs into the tunnels and along to the soda machine under the Farben. I put a dollar bill in and nothing came out. Then I noticed that the light said: Will Not Make Change.

  Underneath this someone had written: Change Is Very Difficult.

  Upstairs again, I stared out the locked front door at the crowd – maybe twenty poor souls. Having been told that there was no chance of getting in, the crowd had turned nasty. Wild-eyed people were banging on the bulletproof glass of the front door. How would I make it to my car?

  Primo materialized to escort me.

  We battled our way through, trying to stay on the sanded and salted walk, the crowd slipping and sliding on the ice on the lawn. It was pathetic, all these people sick of normal life, wanting in to a hospital for the mentally ill. They were downstream from something. We were hauling them up out of the water, but nobody was looking upstream, for whatever that something was.

  My car was blocked from backing out by a small family – father, mother, baby. The father came over to my window and shoved a sign in my face:

  UNEMPLOYED EXECUTIVE.

  WILL WORK FOR FOOD.

  CAN YOU HELP?

  I thought of Malik. Once during the summer, walking with him toward a sporting goods store in the village, we’d passed a drunk asking for change. Malik had given him a dollar. I’d given nothing. The panhandler had said to him, ‘Have a nice day,’ and then turned to me and said ominously, ‘and a safe day, you.’

  ‘Why’d you do that?’ I’d asked him. ‘He’ll just spend it on booze.’

  ‘It’s just my way,’ he’d said, ‘of betting on the Divinity.’

  Outside my car window now, the man was joined by his wife and baby. I started to dig into my pocket for change.

  But then I saw the children, all the children mutilated and killed by men, and though I heard Malik’s voice telling me that these were cries from the mine shaft on behalf of us all, I was filled with despair. How could a God, something Divine, do this? Hannah had said it: ‘This is America, this is it. Normal life. What are we supposed to do? Stay away? Where? How?’ Divinity? Don’t talk Divinity to me. If you’re going to talk anything, talk Hell.

  I looked at the man and shook my head no.

  He gave me the finger and moved away, the harsh wind hitting him, sliding him back, his legs working hard to stay upon the ice, and to keep his wife and baby up too.

  The sun was a red teardrop in the notch of a mountain, leaving a darkness over our low hill. As I pulled away, the klieg lights went on. The crowd, somehow beaten down by them, shrank back from the front door. Illuminated over the portico was brand-new graffiti, spray-painted in Day-Glo orange:

  IN TOUCH WITH A SHITTY TOMORROW.

  ‘Exactly,’ I said out loud, ‘better than being in touch with today.’

  THOREAU

  ‘I have found little that is good about human beings. In my experience most of them are trash.’

  —SIGMUND FREUD

  ‘The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.’

  —HENRY DAVID THOREAU

  Ten

  CHEROKEE WAS OBSESSED. ‘I can’t get it out of my mind,’ he said a few days later in my office up under the eaves of Toshiba, ‘that he’s fucking her in therapy.’

  He looked worse than ever – strawberry-blond hair mussed, gorgeous blue eyes shadowed by lost sleep, lips set in a firm line. As if giving in to the grunge look his daughter Hope had copied from her cousins on the family vacation in Aspen, he had a week’s growth of reddish beard, his shirt collar had lost its snap, and his shirt itself was stained with a reddish blotch shaped remarkably like South America. His jeans seemed baggy, as if he’d lost weight. His hidden messiness had gone public. He had gotten a little Schlomoesque.

  ‘I can’t get it out of my mind!’ he said desperately. ‘The last thing at night, when I close my eyes to go to sleep beside her, there it is, a tiny voice, like a devil sitting on my shoulder whispering in my ear, “He’s fucking her in therapy.” And when I wake up – at five when she gets up – I feel OK for a few seconds and then – bam: “He’s fucking her in therapy.” I lie awake in bed from six to six-thirty, imagining. It’s like I’m there with them, like I can almost see them.’

  ‘What do you see?’

  ‘He’s sitting in his chair behind that couch. She gets up off the couch and lifts her dress and shimmies down her underpants. She bought new underpants in Aspen. White satin, with a lot of lace?’

  ‘No fooling.’

  ‘No. And not for me. I don’t like white all that much. Ever since I hit her in Gstaad, no sex. Nothing. Everything is worse and …’ His eyes glazed over. ‘There it is again: “He’s fucking her in therapy.” I was just then seeing her holding out her hand and leading him to the couch and going down on all fours and hiking her skirt up to her waist. It’s so vivid, almost as if I’m right there watching, peeping through a crack in the door.’

  ‘Have you and she talked about it?’

  ‘Not a word. I tried, she won’t. It’s killing me. It never goes away. In Aspen, there I am with Hope and Kissy at the top of a mountain, looking o
ut over a view you could die for, ready to start the run down, and I hear a whisper in my ear: “He’s fucking her in therapy.” At Eisner’s party, there I am with the two Michaels – Eisner and Ovitz – on either side of me, and boom: “He’s fucking her in therapy.” It’s like a secret I’ve got inside me. Like a cancer or a crime I committed or something. It’s driving me crazy!’

  He did seem a little crazy – eyes wild, lip twitching, hair askew, and foot twitching like poor Mary Megan Scorato’s after Hannah hit her with microdose Placedon. Whether or not Schlomo was screwing Lily, Cherokee was in trouble. And the strange thing was that as Cherokee was seeming more crazed to me, Schlomo had started to seem more normal. No matter how much you despised him, you had to admit that his performances at his Outpatient Team Meetings and at the Misery Academic Seminars were brilliant. Not only brilliant, but human. Whenever he interviewed a patient, or supervised me on patients, he seemed to be able to get it, get with it, zoom in on what was really going on, and despite his Yiddish tummler style, I always came away with more understanding of the person I was trying to deal with. I would sometimes sit with him in the cafeteria as he mangled some mystery meat and dazzlingly talked shrinkery. My custom-made suit was a dream. Schlomo hadn’t repeated his ‘in your lap, boychik’ maneuver, which he claimed was part of a recently diagnosed illness related to his heart disease, a kind of hand-twitch-specific Tourette’s syndrome. His sloppiness I had started to see as a well-known sign of depression, that child facedown in the pool. Sometimes Schlomo would even talk about Ike White’s suicide, as a tragic event befallen a rising star. While every fiber of my being wanted to see Cherokee as basically a regular guy who was being tormented as any man would be by his wife’s behavior, and Schlomo as at best sick if not criminal, more and more I had perched on my own shoulder a devilish doubt, whispering, Maybe not.

  ‘What the hell am I gonna do about this? C’mon, Basch, aren’t you going to help me?’

  It was the fourth time that session he’d asked me the same question. He’d talked for almost thirty minutes nonstop. What could I do? I knew something was missing in my work with him. No matter what I tried, I couldn’t shake him out of his obsession. If I asked him about the obsession itself, he obsessed. If I tried to lead him away from the obsession, finding small openings with which to widen the scope, to other people in his life, he would talk briefly about these others but then – bam: ‘He’s fucking her in therapy.’

  Again I tried to shift the content, asking him bluntly about the first thing he’d told me, back in July when he’d appeared at the Admissions Office at six in the morning: ‘Tell me about feeling like a failure.’

  This led to his talking about his father’s disdain for his not joining Putnam, Weld, Umbeshrein, Sanchez, and Brown, his father’s Wall Street firm, and his going instead straight from Harvard Law to Walt Disney.

  ‘Father always taunted me about that. “Working hard, are you, Cher?” In fact I was working hard, a lot harder than him. People think Disney is all sweet mice singing and dancing with ducks and carefree retarded dogs and bad guys portrayed as fags or blacks, but it’s as tough as they come. I busted butt for Disney, and it paid off. I … um, quit last year, got my golden parachute, retired. But he never respected me for it. “It’s Mickey Mouse,” he’d always say, “Mickey Mouse.”’

  ‘You have some feelings about your father?’

  ‘Yeah yeah, but what am I going to do? Tomorrow morning when she gets up and I hear the water run in the shower and she comes out looking like a million bucks and goes off to him? I half think of getting a gun and blowing him away. Don’t you have any ideas?’

  ‘You have a gun?’

  ‘You think I should get one?’ he said, eyes sparkling with a sudden manic energy. ‘Good idea!’

  ‘No! No, no. No.’

  ‘Shit. Well, do you have any other ideas?’

  I was out of ideas. Everything I said, he said ‘Yes, but’ to, and went back to his obsession. Despite my training, I felt stuck. I knew how to interview people, but I had no idea how therapy worked, of what happened to bring about change. I had learned how to do things in the short run, but had no idea how to make things happen in long-term therapy. Maybe if I myself had ever been in therapy, I might have had some idea of what to do. Even Arnie Bozer, the lunkhead from the Land of Lincoln, had learned from his therapy with Schlomo, talking proudly of how he used Schlomo’s interpretations to him in his early-morning sessions word for word on his own patients all the rest of the day, regardless of their diagnoses, gender, therapy issues, or anything else.

  ‘Schlomo says,’ Arnie would say, ‘“the unconscious is timeless.” This means you can say anything to anyone at any time. That’s my policy, Roy.’

  My own long-term therapies with Zoe and Christine, and intermittently with Solini’s ex-patient Thorny, had been haphazard rough trips, with rare promising moments that later seemed not to ‘take.’ Zoe was back in Toshiba being detoxed, and Christine was back seeing me only because of Bozer’s Heilerization. How did therapy work? How do people change? Do they? Did it?

  Cherokee’s jealous obsession was like a wall around a city. I’d tried all my techniques to get in, and nothing had worked. I had no idea what else to say. I feared that if I didn’t help him now, he wouldn’t come back for another session. Failure loomed. His eyes met mine.

  ‘Great,’ he said, eyes wildly flailing around the room, ‘I’m a failure at this too! This is not working. Ever since that day I came in, everything has gotten worse: no sex, no relationship with my kids, no fun—’

  Suddenly the door opened briskly and in walked a platinum-blond woman. It was my outpatient Christine, the Lady in Black.

  ‘Dr. Basch—’ She looked past me and saw Cherokee. ‘You’re with someone?’

  ‘Yes.’ She looked dazzling. Madonna hair, black tights.

  ‘Don’t we have an appointment at four?’

  ‘Four-fifteen.’

  ‘I thought you said four.’

  ‘Let me check.’ I went to my desk, leaned over my appointment book. I felt behind me their crisscrossing stares, interwoven with their feelings about me, felt it like an electric blanket thrown over my shoulders, set on high. I straightened up and said, ‘Four-fifteen.’

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘My mistake.’

  ‘Look, I can leave early,’ Cherokee said. ‘I don’t mind.’

  ‘No, no, it’s your time,’ she said. ‘I can wait. My name’s Christine.’

  ‘Cherokee.’

  ‘A Native American?’ She smiled, a dazzling porcelain event despite the glitter of a gold bridge tied to a rocky canine, or maybe even more dazzling because of it – a postmodern smile, a kind of deconstructed dental reconstruction. ‘Enjoy, Cherokee.’ She glanced at me. ‘Nice sweater, Doc. Whereja get it?’

  I was wearing the sweater she’d knitted. ‘Thanks.’ She shut the door.

  ‘Can I ask who she was?’ Cherokee asked, eyes wide.

  ‘You can ask but I can’t answer.’

  ‘Does she always come at this time?’

  ‘I can’t tell you.’

  ‘What a knockout,’ he said. ‘I love black.’

  ‘You have some feelings about her?’

  ‘Yes. I feel … compared to her, I feel ugly.’ I was stunned by this. He was about as handsome a man as I’d ever seen. ‘Every comparison I make,’ he went on, ‘I come up short. She’s something else! But I even feel ugly compared to you.’

  ‘Me?’ As he’d been talking, I had been doing my own comparison, feeling really ugly compared to him. So I figured that this was transference, a distortion of our present relationship from his past, and asked, ‘And who have you come up short to in the past?’

  ‘Don’t let it go to your head, Roy,’ he said, ignoring my question, rising. ‘I’ll give Christine the rest of my time. See you next week.’

  He shook my hand and left. I waited. And waited. Obviously they were talking. At 4:45, a half hour late, in she came, f
lushed with excitement.

  ‘What was that?’ she asked, waving a limp hand before her face, as if to cool down after a workout.

  ‘You know I can’t tell you, Christine.’

  ‘Nothing?’ I smiled and shook my head. ‘And I thought you were hot?’

  She talked about Cherokee, Cherokee, and more Cherokee. It was startling to hear how he’d presented himself to her: a normal happy relaxed young guy coming in for a few sessions of therapy in the same spirit he would come in for a few golf lessons to tune up his game, to find out – his words to her:

  ‘What I want to be when I grow up.’

  ‘He’s incredible,’ she said, leaving. ‘I mean talk about a man with potential.’

  ‘Malik?’ I blurted out.

  ‘Thoreau!’ he answered.

  ‘Thoreau?’ I yelled.

  ‘Malik!’ he said.

  ‘Shhh!’ said several voices in the darkness. ‘Shush!’

  It was the next morning. I was settling into a chair at the back of a dark room on the second floor of the Family Unit on Thoreau, my next rotation in Misery. There he was, a high-voltage generator next to me in the dark. He had a basketball. He held it under my nose. ‘Take a whiff.’

  The smell – crisp, pungent new leather spiced with the acridity of vulcanized rubber seams – brought back memories of the new balls we Fish Hawks were handed on game days at Columbia High as we burst out of the locker room led by Konopski and Basch, the co-captains dazzled by the bright lights and cheers of the packed bandbox gym. ‘Ahhh!’ I said, breathing deeply, my nose on the pebbly skin. ‘Converse is my madeleine.’

  ‘Hey, me too! Stim-U-Dent?’

  I took one, and felt the familiar minty sharpness between my teeth. My eyes were accommodating to the dark. A dozen people were there, facing a curtained wall. ‘What the hell are you doing here, Malik?’

  Heads turned, in hostile silence.

  ‘SHHHH!’ Malik said, as loudly as possible.

  ‘SHHHH?’ I said, just as loudly.

  ‘Five, four, three, two – play ball!’ Malik said.

  Bong bong bong bong bong bong bong bong bong.

  A grandfather clock, snaking through a loudspeaker system. The curtain parted. A semicircle of chairs faced us, an empty chair at each end. We were behind a one-way mirror, staring at the Family Olaf, farmers from Missouri, who were about to have their first session of Freudian family psychoanalysis. Their teenager, Oly Joe Olaf Junior, had just been admitted to Thoreau for doing badly at Simeon’s Rest, a special boarding school nearby for students doing especially badly at other schools. Oly Joe, in psychoanalysis with Dr A. K. Lowell, had regressed to an oral stage, and had been spending a lot of time at school in his room curled up under the covers sucking things, refusing to come to Misery for his analysis. He’d been brought into Thoreau so that he could be forced to see A.K., and so that his family could get involved. The family had been flown in for this meeting. Oly Joe Junior sat curled up in a chair looking scared, wearing a baseball cap beak backward and a T-shirt reading ‘No Fear!’ Oly Joe Senior was in an ill-fitting suit, Mrs Olaf in, believe it or not, a calico dress. Six-year-old Betsy, also in calico, sat in her mother’s lap as if camouflaged, clutching a fuzzy yellow duck.