Mount Misery

by Samuel Shem

  ‘So?’

  ‘So what do you make of this?’

  ‘“I make nothing of this,”’ he shouted. ‘To quote Frau Kernberg, private communication.’

  There were gasps of admiration – Krotkey communicates with Frau Kernberg?

  Malik went on, ‘Are you saying, as Freud said, that this is not reality, but fantasy?’

  ‘Freud said,’ Krotkey shouted, ‘“If in the case of girls who produce such an event (seduction) in the story of their childhood their father figures fairly regularly as the seducer, there can be no doubt either of the imaginary nature of the accusation or of the motive that has led to it … We have not succeeded in pointing to any difference in the consequences, whether fantasy or reality has had the great share in these events of childhood.”’

  ‘You’re saying that it doesn’t matter whether it happened or didn’t?’

  ‘What matters is how the girl negotiates the Oedipus conflict.’

  ‘It does matter,’ Malik said heatedly. He coughed. ‘It matters profoundly to the girl, and to her treatment when she—’

  ‘The girl? Girls don’t even know they have a vagina till they’re twelve!’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘I am a physician! I am publishing a book – “A Newer Psychology of Women.” That’s how, cocksucker! Hasta la vista, motherfuckers!’ He started barreling through the crowd toward the door but became entangled in one of our tricky NASA folding chairs. Cursing in German, he tried to extricate himself from its Space Age hinges. Pensilena Teiche, the woman with the leather breasts, tried to help. Malik said something, but too softly to hear. Krotkey leaned toward him and screamed, ‘What?’ Malik repeated it, but so softly that Krotkey had to lean even farther toward him. ‘What?’

  ‘You really hurt people,’ Malik said quietly.

  ‘It takes balls to stand up to all these girls claiming abuse! Try it!’

  ‘I work for FEMS,’ Pensilena said, ‘False External Memory Syndrome. Most memories of abuse are concocted. Quote: “We cannot logically assume that memories of childhood sexual abuse can be repressed.” Reference citation, Harrison Pope and James Hudson, McLean Hospital and Harvard Medical School.’

  Throwing chairs and cursing like what he’d told us we needed to do while fucking, Renaldo Krotkey, and then his amanuensis, crashed out.

  In silence, A.K. and I walked upstairs toward our offices together. As I turned down the hall I heard a familiar voice call out:

  ‘Hey, asshole.’

  I turned. A skinhead stood there. He was pointing a gun at A.K.

  Oly Joe Olaf. His ponytail was gone, his head was completely shaven. His T-shirt read ‘No Fear.’ His hand was shaking. His eyes were wild.

  Paralyzed, I stood there watching. A.K. froze too. Then she said:

  ‘Yes, and how does that gun feel to you, Oly Joe?’

  ‘Fuck feel. I’m gonna blow you away.’

  ‘Yes, and you have some thoughts about that gun, Oly Joe?’

  Oly Joe cocked the trigger, and paused. Then he threw the gun down on the floor. It bounced, as if it were made of plastic. Oly Joe ran out, his combat boots echoing down one flight to his room.

  A.K. stared at the gun, and at me. I picked up the gun.

  ‘It’s not real!’ I said. ‘Did you know that?’

  ‘Biting the breast. I’m discharging him. For acting out.’

  ‘Even though it wasn’t real?’

  ‘Biting that breast was real.’

  I left for my analyst’s home office.

  Fascinating session. Poppa Doc nodded me onto the couch. As usual I associated freely without his saying a word. As was unusual, he didn’t snore. In fact I hardly heard him breathing. Impressive. When I left I glanced at him in the dim half-light, and he didn’t look too happy. I figured this was his empathic response to my being deeply deeply depressed.

  By the time I got back to Thoreau, Zoe had signed out of the Family Unit, AMA – Against Medical Advice.

  ‘Christine broke up with me. She said I’d failed to live up to my potential. I still can’t get it up, but she said that had nothing to do with it, that it wasn’t my dick, it was me! Which is even worse! Not only did you take the starch out of my cock, you took away my … my … my potential! And my wife too! What the fuck is wrong with you? I am a total failure. Fuck!’

  It was the next afternoon, and Cherokee Putnam was finally curling up in the chair in my office in Toshiba, knees clasped in his hands, rocking, heavily into what I knew, with relief, to be his Oral Stage rage.

  ‘You ruined my sex life. All your analysis of Schlomo fucking Lily in therapy has just made it more real. My obsession is worse. And last night Lily said to me, “I’d almost think you’re having an affair, Cherokee, but I figure you can’t be, because you’re too depressed. You’d be happier if you were.”’ He glared at me, his paranoia almost palpable. ‘I’m starting to think you’re in cahoots with Schlomo. You talking about me behind my back?’

  I glanced at the Freud on my desk:

  The clinging to the condition of a penis in the object as well as the retiring in favor of the father, may be ascribed to the castration complex.

  ‘Are you? Answer me.’

  The enmity which the persecuted paranoiac sees in others is the reflection of his own hostile impulses against them.

  ‘You have the fantasy that Dr Dove and I are in cahoots, against you?’

  ‘Yeah! You and Lily and him – all in bed together!’

  ‘Yes, and your anger at me is your lost love for Father?’

  Boom. He wilted. I could almost see his inner vista open up, of Father, hated and loved, and Mother, with no ‘dick’ – or, rather, with a dick so soft as to be invisible.

  ‘And,’ I went on, ‘your keeping secrets from Mother?’

  Boom boom. He wept quietly. ‘I do have a secret. I never told anyone else this.’ I braced myself, ready for incest, beating, murder, zoophilia. ‘You remember when I told you that I quit Walt Disney?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘I didn’t quit, I was fired. Last Christmas in Aspen, I … wasn’t even … invited to Eisner’s. I’m a failure, a total failure. Nothing I do is ever enough. My severance pay is just about gone. I’m just about broke – a secret I’ve kept from Lily. I always tried my best, but now, it’s like my whole life is spread out before my eyes like a patient on a table or something, and I’m looking down on it and I can see that all the while I was trying my best at the wrong things.’ He sighed. ‘Listen. I love this:

  ‘Get all the gold and silver that you can,

  Satisfy ambition, animate

  The trivial days and ram them with the sun,

  And yet upon these maxims meditate:

  All women dote upon an idle man

  Although their children need a rich estate;

  No man has ever lived that had enough

  Of children’s gratitude or woman’s love.’

  I knew the poem, and loved it too: ‘Vacillation,’ by W. B. Yeats. My impulse was to tell him I loved it too. But A.K. would rip me to shreds if I did.

  ‘Yeats,’ he said. ‘Guess you don’t know it. I was Class Poet at Groton. Always wanted to be a poet. At Yale my senior year, I was in a poetry seminar – very select – run by a poet who’d been in a seminar with Anne Sexton? My teacher said I had promise. Said he would help me apply to creative writing programs?’ He shook his head. ‘I chose to make money instead. Not even law, Disney. Mickey Mouse was my big rebellion – some rebellion, Disney’s more the Dow Jones now than GM or GE. Now, I’m out of money. But in two days, a big note comes due, “a rich estate.”’ He stared at me, a dissonantly calm look in his eyes, curious, even quizzical, as if wondering how I would respond. Again I felt torn, wanting to respond but fearing A.K.’s critique of both my wanting and my response. There was something chilling here. I compromised.

  ‘You have some feelings, about your “big note”?’

  He got up and walked to the door
. There were still ten minutes left. His hand was on the doorknob. ‘And now,’ he said, ‘I’ve even failed with you.’

  ‘You’re leaving early?’ I said with alarm, feeling that if he walked out and never came back, I too would be a failure. Once again, compared to good therapists like A.K., I was coming up short.

  ‘Do you care?’ Cherokee asked, his voice again curious, calmly probing, as if from above his life, probing the body below.

  ‘You mean care if you leave early?’

  ‘I mean …’ He gave me a sorrowful look. ‘I mean, just, you know, care.’

  I did. Despite our differences, at that moment I saw his struggle as much like my own. I too felt that no matter what I did I was a failure. I sensed, then, that he was lonely and desperate and needed me to be with him right there, and that I should simply say that to him, say ‘Yeah man, I do.’ But just as the Y of Yeah was pushing off from my silence it was as if a shot of Novocain had hit, freezing my jaw and my tongue and setting my lip atingle. In that instant – what Freud called ‘the procrastinating mechanism of thought,’ which cools our libidinal impulses and assures man’s superiority to beasts, the beasts out there in nature and the beasts within our skulls – into my head marched A.K., stern, and Freud sterner if not sternest – that enormous uncut beard hiding any sign of his lips, those thick steel-rimmed glasses hiding any real sign of his eyes – and before I could figure out exactly what to say to Cherokee, he was gone.

  Sitting there free-associating until time was up – he might come back, might he not? – I felt scared. Was I scared for him or scared for me? His shit or my shit?

  I wanted to run after him, chase him down all the way to the tennis court and beyond, hound him to his house, his barn where he kept his horses, his office in the hayloft off limits to Lily and the girls because it was the nerve center of the phone calls and faxes of his doomed thing with Christine, wanted to take him into my arms as Malik had taken Oly Joe in that old yellowed gym that night, as any caring father would a frightened son, yes. But I felt the lead weight of psychoanalysis, the flowering of Western civilization, pressing me down on my chair, as if all the Freudians on earth were a species apart, men and the rare woman of greater gravity and—

  A knock on my door. My heart did a flip-flop. Hope. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Any dickheads in here?’

  Thorny. In a crisp white shirt and bow tie and the kind of suspenders the Generation X bankers were now wearing. He came in as if this were his TV room at home and sat down casually and said, ‘You’re in deep shit, Doc.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Your head’s messed up. I couldn’t believe what you did to Zoe. And then not even lettin’ me into Thoreau t’see her? Bad move, Doc, wicked bad. She asked me to deliver this to you. Personally.’ He handed me a letter.

  Dear Dr Roy G. Basch:

  I am firing you as my therapist. You are brainwashed. I can’t take it anymore. I had a secret consultation last week with Dr Schlomo Dove. He said that I was a person with all the warmth of the sun, but that I give my warmth to everyone else and it leaves me feeling cold and empty – like to you. He is taking me on as his own patient. Maybe you should find another profession, one that rewards heartlessness, like law.

  Have a nice life.

  Zoe

  P.S. Butler abused me. Really. And there really is a dead child buried in our backyard in the Adirondacks. I could have shown you where to dig.

  I was shaken by this and furious at Schlomo, so shaken and furious that it took all my skill to hide it from Thorny.

  He scrutinized me. ‘Anything you want me to tell Zoe, Doc?’

  I wanted to say to tell her that I cared about her and wanted her back as a patient and I’d tried my hardest but I said, only, ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like, “Hey, all is forgiven come home let’s try again, kid”?’ He waited, much like a good analyst would. ‘Tell you a secret, Doc – she’d kill me if she knew I said it: she really wants you, you know, as a therapist. You’ve helped her a lot this year. She knows you care. All you got to do is ask.’

  Ask. Malik’s main word. Everything in me consciously wanted to ask, but I had seen, through A.K. and Poppa Doc, just how untrustable my conscious mind was, given my monstrous unconscious, and so I knew I’d better not.

  ‘Dickheads Get Shrunk,’ Thorny said, rising. ‘It’s pathetic.’

  Viv beeped me that night, when I was on call, for a phone call from Lily Putnam, Cherokee’s wife. Lily had never called me before. Something was up.

  My instinct was to talk to her but again I heard A.K.’s voice: ‘You did what?’ So I thought of telling Viv I couldn’t talk to her. But that didn’t feel right either. Then I thought that, since A.K. was supervising me on Cherokee and was ultimately the person responsible, I’d call her at home. I asked Viv to tell Lily I’d call her back. I called A.K.

  ‘Lily Putnam wants to talk to me. Cherokee’s wife. I’m worried about Cherokee. He left today’s session ten minutes early.’

  ‘Wait,’ A.K. said. The receiver clunked down on something. I heard a key unlock something. A.K. was back. ‘Tell me about the session.’

  I told her. I heard the scritch scritch of her pencil, doing the crossword in the ledger as I talked. When I finished, A.K. said, ‘Tell his wife to call her analyst.’

  ‘Schlomo Dove?’

  ‘We can’t all be lucky.’

  ‘What?’ I said, thinking, This is a strange way to talk about your former analyst. ‘What do you mean by that?’ Silence. ‘But you think Cherokee is OK?’

  ‘Work it out on the couch.’

  ‘You mean in another phantom session, if he doesn’t come back?’

  ‘Not him, you. In your analysis.’

  ‘With Poppa Doc?’

  Scritch scritch. ‘Who?’

  ‘Never mind.’

  I hung up and called Viv. I told her to tell Lily Putnam to call her analyst, Schlomo Dove. I felt bad, but I knew that I’d done the right thing by calling my supervisor, and I was relieved now that A.K. was taking responsibility for deciding that Cherokee was basically OK. I couldn’t wait until the next afternoon, to tell Poppa Doc the news.

  Jill was having a party that night, in her new apartment on top of a converted factory. One wall was all window, offering a panoramic view of the sky, perfect for sighting UFOs. She had invited friends who were into aliens. The lights were off inside, so that everyone could see outside. Interesting reversal of psychoanalysis. The talk was about the latest news from Fyffe, Alabama, of cattle mutilations. The cows had been found dead, parts surgically removed as if by a laser beam, with no signs of trauma, struggle, or blood.

  Each conversation felt slightly askew, for the eyes of the UFO-watcher were continually moving in a nystagmus – flicking from me to the night sky, from the sky back to me – the kind of eye wobble I’d seen at parties where real stars were present and people were always looking past you at them.

  ‘Great party,’ I said to Jill after everyone had left, as she stood at the sink washing the last dishes. I put my arms around her and stroked her tummy. Since that night on-call when my dick had ‘done a Cherokee,’ we hadn’t made love, but now I felt ready. ‘I’m dying to make love to you!’

  ‘Uh-huh. C’mon.’ She wiped her soapy hands and took my hand. We lay down on her bed facing the wide milky night. ‘Talk to me, OK?’

  I found that I was blocking.

  She rose on an elbow and stared into my eyes. ‘Don’t you understand? Talk to me, and you will get laid great. I will fuck your brains out, OK?’

  ‘I thought Eduardo was interesting.’ Eduardo was a handsome young man from Ecuador who was a guide for tours to the Galápagos.

  ‘Yeah? How?’

  ‘It was interesting how his interest in plants and animals was an identification with his mother.’

  Jill stared at me anxiously. ‘He thought you were weird. He asked me, “Are all psychiatrists so weird?”’

  ‘Only the unanalyzed think we�
��re weird.’

  ‘Y’know, when people find out I work at Misery, they ask me that same question. I used to say, “Some are a little weird, and go into it to understand themselves” – which is weird when you come to think of it since you should go into it to help people – “and some want to stand back and observe people” – which is also weird, since that doesn’t help anyone either. But now, I just agree with them. Eduardo said that his last tour group was all doctors – about twenty of them. And six of them were really strange. Like quiet? Scrunched up, faces all scrunched up? Into themselves more than into the Galápagos? Guess what? He found out five were shrinks, and one was a pathologist.’

  ‘Interesting.’

  ‘Roy, come on!’

  ‘You’re getting upset.’

  ‘You’re damn right I’m getting upset! And you’re going to listen!’

  ‘I am listening.’

  ‘Well, then respond! If you don’t respond to me right now I’m going to rip your eyes out!’

  I was blocking even worse. She stared at me as if I were a giant lizard of the Galápagos, and then she got up, went to the window, and scanned.

  ‘See any?’

  ‘Look,’ she said, turning to face me, ‘I’ve stuck with you all year, through the Heiler bullshit and the crap on Toshiba, but this is the worst. You are so weird! There’s no “now” for you now – you’re either fantasizing about the future or remembering the past – five minutes ahead or five years behind – you are never here anymore! I have no idea what’s going on with you, in the rest of your life! And I get the feeling there’s lots. You back with Berry?’

  ‘No way. I’m free.’

  ‘So why aren’t you here? I stuck around for the first three rotations, but I don’t know if I can take the fourth! I have no idea who I’m dealing with!’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’m done with surprises. Psychoanalysis is it.’

  ‘Roy. I’ve worked at Misery a lot longer than you – I’ve seen what it does to people. Being a shrink is a very unnatural act! Humans aren’t designed for it! Please – there’s still time – this is it, right now – you can’t wait for it to change, or for something different to happen tomorrow, because I’m going to feel this way tomorrow too. Don’t go blind on me.’