Mount Misery

by Samuel Shem

  ‘You could pay for it, privately.’

  ‘I don’t know if it would be worth it.’

  She jumped in her chair as if shot. I, as surprised as she at this blast from my unconscious, went on, ‘I’m sorry about Oly Joe. We’ve both been having a helluva hard time. We both really screwed up.’

  ‘“The relation between analyst and patient is based on a love of truth, that is, on the acknowledgment of reality, and it precludes any kind of sham or deception.”’ She smiled. ‘“Analysis Terminable and Interminable.”’

  ‘I … I don’t get it.’ She said nothing. For some reason I thought about how I still had her Oly Joe ledger hidden away, and how she must have missed it and wondered who had it, but had never asked me about it. Strange.

  ‘Cigar?’

  I nodded. She rose and went to a table-high humidor, searching for a key in her pocket. I too stood up, and took a few steps to her desk.

  For the first time I saw the small framed black-and-white photo: Schlomo Dove stood in front of the Farben, short, fat, and rumpled, flashing his snaggly-toothed smile, seeming about ten years younger. Next to him on one side stood a woman taller than he, a slender young woman with a Jewish nose, light brown hair cut short, and wearing a silky summer dress. This must have been A. K. Lowell when she was still Aliyah K. Whatever, before she’d had her nose job and bulked up and started wearing men’s power suits. Analyst and patient.

  On the other side of Schlomo, with a gap between them, stood Ike White. Slender, smooth-cheeked, with a cute cowlick, he too seemed young. His face looked pained. I recalled Viv telling me that A.K. and Ike had been best friends, classmates at the institute, and that both of them had been analyzed, at the same time, by Schlomo Dove.

  Then my eyes chanced upon a few papers on her desk: two bills, on her embossed stationery. The first bill was to the NASA grant for Oly Joe Olaf’s sessions – at $200 per fifty-minute session – for the month of March: $4,000 and 00/100 dollars. With astonishment I saw that the last billable hour was the very Sunday on which I had found Oly Joe on her couch. The second bill was to Mr Olaf, Oly Joe’s father, ‘Prairie Home Farm, Tipton, Missouri,’ a bill for ‘expenses incurred in replacing psychoanalytic couch and Persian carpet after damage caused by your son’s suicide attempt: ‘$4,534 and 59/100 dollars.’

  I looked at A.K. She glanced at me and then at the bills, offering me a cigar. Numbly I took the cigar, cut it, lit it, and puffed it silently. I sat back down.

  ‘It’s hard for me,’ I said finally, ‘thinking of Cherokee. All during your supervision, I never asked him more about whether he was thinking about suicide. Before I started with you, I did ask him, and he denied it. But whenever I brought it up with you, you told me not to ask him directly, that it would pollute the transference. I did what you told me. But he was obsessed with suicide. He talked to his wife about it all the time! I blew it. You blew it. That night when his wife called me and I called you, you said not to talk to her. Maybe, if I had …?’ I stared at her. ‘I thought you knew what you were doing.’

  Silence.

  ‘I keep seeing him, how it must have been for him, knowing he was about to kill himself, the loaded gun already in his Jeep, asking his wife Lily that last time, for help – “Do you love me enough?” – seeing her and his sweet little girls for what he knew would be the last time, ever! – and then driving away from his house, his kids, for the last time, getting out of the car, walking out into the beach grass, putting the gun into his mouth – what was he thinking, actually taking the gun and actually putting it in his mouth? The taste of the metal on his tongue? Did he pause? He was smart, clear-headed – and he was really putting a loaded gun in his mouth?’

  I started to cry, seeing the little girls, the gun in the mouth, being with him as he wondered whether or not to pull the trigger; finally I was starting to cry, thank God! ‘The gun … the barrel in his mouth, his lips, his teeth?’ My body shook with sobs, but as I stopped I heard a scritch scritch. I looked up and was stunned to see that A.K. was writing in her leather-bound ledger.

  ‘“Teeth”?’ she asked. ‘And are you thinking about your dead father the dentist?’

  ‘Are you joking?’ I said. She looked up, and then began writing once again, first on the left-hand side, then on the right. ‘Can’t you say anything, I mean, like from your heart?’

  ‘Yes, and when someone leaves they take a piece of your heart with them.’

  Poppa Doc’s line. Do they learn those lines by rote, like child’s rhymes?

  Then it was as if my vision cleared. I saw her as totally empty, so empty that if I had my old House of God stethoscope with me and put it on her chest to listen for signs of life, I would hear nothing, nothing except the echo of my own breathing. I had the impulse to leap the desk like a net in tennis and plunge a number 2 into her chest.

  ‘You killed him!’ I shouted. ‘You kill them all! You don’t know fuck-all what you’re doing. You haven’t got a clue. Because you haven’t got a heart! You mind-fucker! It’s sick, what you do – you’re fucking sick!’

  No reaction, none at all.

  I took as deep a puff of the cigar as possible and thought about throwing it at her; but then I knew what would hurt her more. I took another long puff, until the tip glowed red, and then threw it down on the head of her Freud couch. Ashes scattered all over it. At that she rose and I crushed it in, smushing the ashes around. Then I turned and walked out, slamming the door as hard as I could behind me. It echoed through the barren house like a gunshot.

  As I passed the child’s room on the second floor I heard her little boy crying. As I passed through the family room, all dark wood and gloom and dark leather and Robert smoking a pipe and reading Town and Country, I said, ‘You poor bastard!’ Robert said nothing. I found myself out on a suburban street.

  I breathed in the cleansing sorrow of the rain and stared back up at the castle, its two lit windows – bottom left and top right – like the eyes of a huge warped face, and I saw clearly how through psychoanalysis you could know every nook and cranny of yourself and have no idea how to be with anyone, the seeming dazzle of the self blinding you to the connections with others. I remembered Berry saying once that what we need in the world isn’t an analysis of ourselves, but to live with a lot of examples of good relationships.

  And I knew then that I had once been in touch with people, with Berry and Malik and Solini and Jill, and that it wasn’t inevitable that we are always shouting across an unbridgeable gap, but rather that the gap was in Freud and monstrous fabrications like A.K. herself who followed after, bereft souls floating untethered in pools of self like lilies in sepsis, the gap was in them, not in the essence of humans, nor in the essence of the whole world.

  I stared up at the vigilant street lamp, the cone of glittering sleet in the winter night reaching toward me like a beacon, showing me as clearly as if it were the moment’s sun that the real perversion of Freud and analysis was to take the essence of something and reduce it to something else – the present to the past, love to hate, joy to misery, life to death – and to do it under the guise of understanding and yet, let’s face it, all the while doing it to escape from what Malik kept saying life at heart actually is – being, without description of that being.

  For A.K. and the armies of obsessive scared kids like her, any other thing was better than eye-to-eye and heart-to-heart, anything was better than having someone else see your own sightlessness, or feel your own not feeling the beat of your heart in your chest, or sense your own insensitivity to your soul – anything was better than seeing that you were blind to the essence of love.

  I needed to be with someone right then, but the ones I loved were gone.

  Were they? Berry and Malik maybe were gone and maybe not. Maybe I could go home right now and call them up and they would answer, and we could make plans to get together, talk, puzzle this all out, and … Yeah, and then what?

  With alarm I saw that what was gone was something else.
To move toward them was not possible. My mind had been set spinning by A.K., and it would not stop spinning just because I wanted it to. It was spinning in the same way that poor Cherokee’s had been spinning – his about suicide and his wife fucking Schlomo – round and round, the needle digging deeper into the groove. Eyes open, eyes shut, it didn’t matter – the same record was playing and it was the record of me myself and I.

  I saw myself trapped in a monstrous cell of myself, a cell so vast that from where I stood on the cold stone floor in the center between the execrable toilet and hard steel bed, even the bars were as far off as the edges of the world, beyond the edges of my vision, so that even if there were any other humans out there, they were out there out of sight over the horizon, not even remotely close to being in here with me.

  Nor could I in good faith let them try.

  They were too far away and it was late, too late, too late, not because they were gone but because what was gone, in spite of its bloated enormity and the damage it had done – to Cherokee and Zoe and poor Oly Joe and the kids Oly Joe killed and to Henry and Hannah and Jill and Malik and Berry and my father, caring and concerned all – what was gone was any semblance of the person who had the potential to be with others. What was gone was not at all the opposite of this ravenous self of mine but something else, something other even than any possible me, something else essential for being with others, something categorically else which, to my dismay, I realized I had no idea how to name, or what it could possibly be.

  THE HEIDELBERGS

  ‘It’s one thing to desire a person’s happiness, it’s another to deny them their pain.’

  —BERRY, CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGIST

  HEIDELBERG WEST

  ‘They [social deviants] behave like monkeys in the wild.’

  —DR FREDERICK K. GOODWIN, FORMER DIRECTOR,

  National Institute of Mental Health

  Fourteen

  ‘… I CALLED CHEROKEE’S wife and told her that he and I had been having an affair. Maybe it was the wrong thing to do, but I was so upset, and felt so alone, I had to talk to someone. A real person, not someone in the helping professions, like you. It’s so sad! He was a nice guy, a real nice guy. I didn’t care that he couldn’t get it up. It was even kind of nice, in a way; him being soft … That first time I met him I said to you, “He’s too good to be true” – remember?’ I nodded. ‘And he was! He had everything – a nice wife, two terrific kids, money, me! Why wasn’t it enough?’

  ‘Enough?’

  ‘To keep him alive? What’s with him? What’s with you men? I mean it got so that anything I said, he took as criticism – last month he got a new car, a Jeep Cherokee Limited Edition, and I said, “Hey, that’s a great nickname for you, hon: Jeep Cherokee” – and you know what he said?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He said, “Cherokee Limited would fit a lot better with the state of affairs.”’ Christine shook her head, and reached for her black hankie. ‘It’s so … so damn pointless … and sad.’ She lowered her platinum-blond head and wept, sobbing hard, all that black of hers finally appropriate to the occasion, mourning his lost potential. ‘I feel—’ She raised her face to me, mascara streaming all the way to the corners of her scarlet lips. ‘—like I did when my father died, when I first came to see you … God, it seems like so long ago. You wanna … wanna know the first thing that comes to mind?’

  ‘No, I’d like to know what Cherokee’s wife said, after you told her.’

  ‘You would?’ I nodded. ‘Well, for a long time she said nothing, and then she said, “Did he talk about me?” And I said – maybe I shouldn’t’ve, but I did – “Yes. He was obsessed with your having an affair with your shrink, Dr Dove.” And then I didn’t hear anything and I said, “Hello? Lily? You still there?” And then the line went dead – she hung up on me. I tried to call back but she wouldn’t answer. Was it a mistake?’

  ‘I don’t know. We’ve got to stop. We’ll talk about it next week.’

  ‘’Kay.’ She went to the doorknob and turned. I braced myself. ‘Funny, but I don’t feel that bad. Not like killing myself. Not like at first, when my dad’s diabetes got him, and he went legally blind, and lost both legs, and then died. You helped me a lot today.’ She looked at me quizzically. ‘You must feel like shit? I know you won’t answer me but—’

  ‘I do feel like shit.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Startled, she stared at me. ‘I hope your wife can help you, I mean with it.’ She shook a finger at me, like a schoolmarm. ‘Don’t you think about suicide, or else! I mean it is not a viable alternative.’ I grinned, a little. ‘What I mean is that I need you, Dr Basch. Bye-bye now.’

  Suicide was a thought, but merely a thought that existed somewhere far away from the cramped low-ceilinged room in which I was now trapped with my guilt and shame. I was thinking about Cherokee all the time. Even when I was not consciously thinking about him I was startled to find him underlying all that I was thinking. My mind would snap back to him, my work with him, replaying our sessions over and over, replaying my supervisions with A.K. about him, trying to understand how much of this tragedy was me, how much was my fucked-up thing with A.K. As Malik had said, I was to blame, we were all to blame. I had learned in medicine that the main way you got into trouble with patients was when, if you were not sure what to do, you tried to go it alone and did not ask for help. This time, with A.K., I had asked her for help, all along the way. But I had been asking the wrong person. Like asking Mickey Mouse for empathy.

  Deaths echo deaths. Ike White, Mary Megan Scorato, the Man Who Froze to Death to Sue His HMO, my father, and Cherokee. Where were they all now?

  Nowhere except with me. Death was always there with me now, but I was rarely there with it. Numb, in shock from all these deaths, I was seventy percent there, at most. I was thinking that I was a jinx to live people, as if too much contact with me would put them at grave risk. On the lookout for their fragility, I treated them gingerly.

  Now, with Christine gone, I picked up the phone and called Cherokee’s number, to talk to Lily. It rang and rang.

  ‘There are no psychological or social factors in mental illness!’ Errol Cabot yelled over his bulky shoulder at me, out-shouting the perverse April wind. ‘If it’s mental illness, by definition it’s biological.’

  If I had heard these words at any other time in the previous nine months of my training to become a psychiatrist, I would have laughed, thinking, They must be joking. But nine months of Misery had shown me that if I thought they were joking, they were probably dead serious.

  ‘The patient is psychotic until proven otherwise!’ Win Winthrop screamed. ‘Which means,’ he went on, ‘everybody in the West.’

  ‘“The West”?’

  ‘Heidelberg West. Psychosis. The worst psychotics on the face of the earth. Treatment failures elsewhere. Referred to us.’

  Win and Errol the celluloidal redheads were carrying a lead box filled with tubes of blood and urine up the steep hill from Emerson, where they’d just finished bleeding Blair Heiler’s patients in the name of the Department of Defense. Virtually all Emersonians were now officially on Placedon and Zephyrill. The small differences from placebo had been analyzed all the way up to ‘significant.’ Heiler and Errol and Win were rushing full-blast into publication in the most prestigious journals on earth.

  Win and Errol were manic. They moved fast, talked fast, and thought as fast and dirty as if life were taking place in the locker room of a men’s gym. They had been up since five – after about four-hours-a-night of sleep – jogging around Misery with Lloyal von Nott and ‘Beef’ Telly, the short, tough Security chief who always clutched a walkie-talkie tightly to his heart. Beef, who Primo had told me was manic depressive and who for the past two springs had tried to kill himself, first with roach poison and then with rat, always jogged last, protecting their rear. Now, despite the chill mountain morning, both Win and Errol wore open-necked summer shirts under their long white lab coats. Sweat glistened on both
men’s brows. Their necks and torsos and arms and even fingers seemed bulging and bulky, with that fatty sculpted look that you see only in men and women using anabolic steroids. The thick gold chain around Errol’s neck seemed too tight, as did the class ring the size of a Placedon capsule not on his ring finger but on his pinkie. Around Win’s porcine neck was an amulet of bone and feather, with a dog tag:

  Warrior-Wildman Camp Key West.

  Do or Die for Keen and Bly.

  If psychiatrists specialized in their defects, did that mean that these drug jocks were pumped up on drugs?

  They dumped the blood and urine on the lab tech in the Farben. As they turned to race out, Errol bumped into me. ‘Do you have a dog?’

  ‘No, I don’t have a dog, why?’

  Throwing me aside he put on a burst of speed and tried to catch Win, whose white lab coat was already flapping, deer-tail-like, far ahead up the road. I ran after them.

  The road from the Farben to the Heidelbergs first went down toward the lake but then took a sharp left turn along the stream that fed it, north up a ravine into the pine woods, twisting and turning, up and down, although the grade – always one step ahead of the racing drug mavens – kept going up and up, until there was a fork in the road, and there, on facing bluffs across the scary ravine, were identical three-story stone buildings, the Heidelbergs. The side of each building nearest to the ravine was a massive, five-story whitewashed stone tower, with nine orange-red rings around the bottom half, four fortress-style windows rising one to a floor, and each tower capped with a dark dome out of which protruded a grand spike, from which sprouted a golden ball and then a weather vane shaped like a blunt-nosed fish, or maybe a whale, crested with a tiny pineapple. These were the famous replicas of the twin bridge towers at the gateway into the real city of Heidelberg. They had been built on Mount Misery at the start of the century by the mother of a male patient, who had been conceived when Mother had ‘left her heart in HeiIdelberg,’ as well as her virginity, on a grand tour of Europe. The Heidelbergs were linked, across the ravine, by an exquisitely arched wrought-iron footbridge, the delicate ironwork faux-crenellations spoiled somewhat by the high steel fencing recently built to discourage suicides from this bridge, nicknamed ‘Loopy Lovers Leap.’ Heidelberg West was Psychopharmacology, or drug therapy; Heidelberg East was Alcohol and Drug Recovery.