Mount Misery

by Samuel Shem

  When she saw me, she stopped still. Then without a word she walked to the gate and stared into my eyes.

  ‘Hi,’ I said.

  ‘What happened to you?’ Berry asked.

  ‘You mean where was I?’

  ‘No, no, I mean now. What happened?’

  ‘Why? What do you see?’

  ‘Your eyes are filled with light. What happened?’

  ‘C’mon. I’ll tell you.’ She hesitated. ‘I know, I know,’ I said, ‘it’s crazy, to just show up like this. But I’ve got to talk to you. If you’ll just give me an hour, that’s all—’

  ‘That’s all? You show up out of the blue, your eyes all funny, and you’re just going to give me an hour?’

  ‘You want more?’

  ‘Still afraid of that?’

  ‘No, I mean not right now. I need to show you something, at my place. OK?’ She nodded. ‘C’mon.’

  As we drove along I told her about my night in the hospital, my morning on the beach, and as I told it I heard it as simple, clear, like when you tell someone your home address. We parked at my house.

  ‘On your face?’ she asked. ‘Really on your face?’

  ‘Very much so.’

  ‘In the sand?’

  ‘Still got some grit, in my teeth.’

  ‘Roy, that’s wonderful!’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘I know.’ She hesitated. ‘Shit.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s just that – I don’t know – I was starting to get over your being gone …’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And you’re here, you creep. I mean you’re really here.’

  ‘Like I wasn’t, that day on the beach.’

  ‘And when I tried to get to you that day, you kept saying, “But I am here, damnit! What’s wrong with you? You’re too damn sensitive.”’ She sighed. ‘Creep.’

  ‘I’m sorry. Really sorry.’ I took her hand, looked into her eyes, and was filled with a sense of our history together, our care and concern – more – filled with a curiosity of who she was right now, for I saw that despite our years together I didn’t really know who this woman was, and I wanted to, desperately. ‘I love you, you know. I’ve never stopped.’

  She said nothing, and looked away, out her window.

  ‘Will you come in?’ I asked. ‘Got something I need to show you.’ She nodded. I started to get out of the car. She touched my shoulder. I turned back to her.

  ‘It’s foolish for me to tell you this, Roy, but me neither.’

  Now we looked into each other’s eyes without shying away – for me as if for the first time, that scary sacred time when I a boy first looked into her a girl’s eyes without shying away – and I saw her eyes soften from a woman’s to a girl’s, and glow a little with tears, as did mine. We were too scared to touch each other.

  We got out and I led her upstairs to the turret bedroom and opened the top drawer of the dresser and took out the small IV bottle of normal saline and the polyethylene tubing with the stopcock and butterfly needle and the bottle of phenobarb. She asked, ‘What’s all that for?’

  ‘To kill myself.’

  She gasped. ‘No way!’ She snatched it all up and held it to her chest. ‘Do you have any more pills?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m getting rid of all this.’ She flushed the pills down the toilet and wrapped the IV bottle in a towel and smashed it with a hammer and sliced up the tubing into macaroni and bent the butterfly with a pair of pliers. I led her back to the turret and dimmed the chandelier and went around to the five windows and pulled the shades. We faced each other across the bed, our eyes gradually getting used to the darkness, sight coming back in stages, first the outline of her body, then the contour of her face, then her eyes.

  For the longest time we said nothing. The bed was a barrier and a link. I sensed the energies flowing back and forth between us as if made of fine filament, say silk, that light that strong, the energies as bright and clear and usual as the ones we as babies possess before they get normalized out of us, and I saw then that this was what she might call ‘mutual’ and I might call ‘being with’ and Malik might call ‘soul’ and we all might call ‘spirit.’

  I whispered, ‘I’m asking you for help.’

  ‘I’m here,’ she whispered back. I heard her crying. She bowed her head, and put her face in her hands. I stood there with my hands at my sides and cried too, not only for her but for my father, who died before I could live with him with any compassion, and before he could see any of my children.

  Crying together softened us, lightened us.

  I asked, ‘How can I help you?’

  ‘Just by that, by asking. It works both ways.’

  ‘What are you crying about?’

  ‘I’m crying for us.’

  ‘Us?’

  ‘And I’m pissed as hell at you.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘No you don’t. Thanks to you, you creep, I gained eight pounds.’

  The next morning I stood outside Malik’s door, knocking, to no answer. He was still refusing to go to any meetings, refusing to talk to his sponsor or to me. I opened the door and went in. The window shade was drawn against the morning. Light seeped in, in three widening slats.

  Malik was lying on his side of the bed, curled up, head bowed, hands tucked into his chest, wearing jeans and a white T-shirt of which the visible portion read ‘—OREST.’ I stood, watching. He coughed, once, twice, clutched himself tighter to himself, and settled again.

  I walked to the edge of his bed and sat down.

  He stirred, sat up, staring at me with puzzlement, and then curiosity.

  ‘How are you?’ I asked.

  ‘What’s with you?’

  ‘I want to hear about you—’

  ‘No, no,’ he said, waving me away, ‘go on.’

  ‘I’m not here to talk about me, Malik.’

  ‘It’s all the same,’ he said insistently. ‘Talk.’

  I stared at him for a moment, reluctant to go along with his deflection of attention from himself to me. He stared back, his eyes steady, suspicious. Deft, he’d always said, you gotta be deft. Don’t go at suspicion head-on. I started to tell him about where I was. Things I’d kept secret: my seeing Schlomo screwing Zoe, my preparations for suicide, Zoe coming to my apartment.

  ‘Schlomo!’ he said. ‘The shit!’

  ‘And there’s another victim.’ I told him about Lily Putnam.

  ‘What have you done about it?’

  ‘I can’t get either of them to report him, or allow me to. I need help.’

  ‘We’ll get to that. Go on.’

  I told him about my emergency room shift. My walk on the beach. ‘I’ve been doing a lot of crying,’ I said, ‘for my father, for Berry, for all the dead patients this year. I don’t know why this is all happening, but it is.’

  ‘We don’t know shit about “why” things are, so we make up all kinds of stories – shrinks make up the most bizarre stories – about penises, about brain molecules. Why did Zoe come to your apartment that night?’

  ‘She said she had to. To keep from killing herself.’

  ‘Yeah well, what you and she didn’t know is, she was the Grace of God, walking into your life.’

  ‘And I was that, at first, for you?’

  He looked down at his hands. ‘When I first met you, with Ike just having been destroyed by this place, I felt I had to try to show you what I understood. Over the year, I’ve watched you being crushed, turning cynical and bitter. Then, out in the woods – you and Solini show up? In here, I saw that if I could save you, I might just save myself.’

  ‘Save us?’

  ‘Us. Yeah.’

  ‘But how? The deeper I look, the more I see I’m totally obsessed with comparing myself to others! It’s hell!’

  ‘Yeah, I know. It’s a bitch, isn’t it?’

  ‘You too?’

  ‘I’m worse than you – see? There it is.’

  ‘B
ut you don’t seem trapped by it.’

  ‘Oh, I’m great at “seeming,” oh yeah.’

  I felt the ‘click.’ This was what he had wanted me to ‘ask’ about, and what I’d shied away from, sending him walking out into the rain in disgust.

  ‘“Seeming” to love?’

  Our eyes met. His, dark as dusk, filled with shame and flickered away. In that flickering away from me I had a sense of seeing him from close up and far off, both at once. Seeing him not only right then and there but seeing him as part of his whole life. The brilliant shy kid fleeing his family for the elephants, and from his pain at the plight of ‘the big fellas’ developing a talent for compassion, going on to use his strange brilliance and intensity and sense of other people to focus attention on the experience of others, drawing others to him while deflecting attention from himself, holding back, not really joining in. This whole year, he had been Malik the One Who Understands More than Me, but he had never really connected in the way in which he talked about connecting. Was he too specializing in his defect? I saw now how he’d used alcohol to break through this ‘seeming,’ it only seeming to help adding another layer of falsity.

  ‘Buddy?’ I said. ‘You can let me see you, it’s OK.’

  He raised his eyes to mine. I sensed his understanding that I understood. Shame lifted and his eyes pooled with tears. I filled with an appreciation of him, of all that he had come to understand and live. And I saw all that he was about to lose, what we all would lose in losing him. Tears came. I tried to stop them but they wouldn’t stop and my body shook with sobs. He and I sat there crying. As naturally as a father might comfort his child after a fall, I brought his head to my shoulder. I hugged him. Felt his bristly growth of beard.

  ‘Fucking cancer fucking toxic shit!’ he sobbed into my neck. Through the smell of vomit and night sweat and the poison of alcohol and the boniness of his shoulder and the crab of cancer snapping at the delicate pink air sacs of his lungs, through and for all this, I hugged him and he me.

  After a while we sat back. He reached over and handed me a Kleenex, and took one himself. We blew our noses, two sad foghorns in the sickroom.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘You know, all that time out in the woods drinking, all the time I’ve been in here, my mind is going, over and over, “Malik, you’re worse than everybody,” or “Malik, you’re better than everybody.” It’s disgusting.’

  ‘I know. In my head, I’ve got a continuous feature playing – “The Roy G. Basch Story.” The more I try to erase it, the more it’s there. How can I get rid of it?’

  ‘What worked for me, these two years, is getting down on my knees, morning and night. Ask for help in the morning. Thank for the day’s help, at night.’

  ‘You prayed?’ I felt the little hairs on the back of my neck rise.

  ‘Prayed and meditated. You know how to meditate?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Want me to show you?’ I nodded. ‘This method is the Buddha’s own.’ He sat me next to him on the bed. Told me to close my eyes. ‘When you look into a mirror,’ he said, ‘you see your body. When you look with your eyes closed, you see your mind. And then you’ve got no excuses – what you see is what you get. You see you. Focus attention on your breath. When your attention wanders, notice what it’s wandered to, and bring it gently back to the breath. Don’t judge it, just bring it back to the breath. Wanna do five minutes?’

  ‘Sure.’ I closed my eyes. It was impossible to focus attention on my breathing for more than five seconds at a time. My mind was busy with fragmented images of trivial days. Five minutes seemed an eternity. Malik called time and asked what it had been like. I said, ‘What a mess.’

  ‘No joke. You think “The Book of Basch” is bad, you should see “The Legend of Leonard A. Malik.”’

  ‘And this shit is going on in my mind all the time?’

  ‘At least all the time, yop.’

  ‘What a waste, what crap! What do I do about it?’

  ‘Do nothing!’ he said, his energy rising. ‘Do as much nothing as possible! Just see it for what it is, just your mind. See that crap – and the anger and shame and sadness for all that crap – and sorrow for all that too – and don’t lift a finger. Don’t try to fix it. Sit with that sorrow, feel the edge and sharpness of that sorrow. And then – it’s unbelievable! – after a while it starts to move. Sorrow can’t stay still, kid, it has to move! As it moves, it starts to lose its grip on you. You get to know the pettiness and envy so well that when it bites you in your gut – “I’m not enough!” – you recognize it and you say, “Oh there’s that snake biting me in the gut,” and you remember to breathe, and you breathe, you go on. You see it as just a fact. And if we get with the facts, kid, we’re free. And if we don’t, the snake grows in us and sucks our spirit dry.’

  ‘Like it did to Ike White?’

  ‘Like it did to poor fucking Ike White. What killed his spirit was always tryin’ to become the Best Shrink in the World, and always feelin’ like a failure for not.’

  We sat quietly together and the weight of this settled, the way the weight of a baby lying on your chest settles as she falls asleep.

  ‘Malik?’ It was Frankie at the door. ‘Patient Speaker Meetin’?’

  Malik looked to me. ‘Will you come with?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Frankie, I’m gonna bring my doctor along.’

  Patient Speaker Meeting was an in-house AA meeting, a kind of dry run for the outside world. The speaker was the same ugly Irish drunk who’d knocked me aside my first day on Heidelberg East. Now he was clean-shaven, in a clean shirt, shaky but speaking clearly. His story was horrific. Alcoholic mother and father, first drink out in the woods with the boys, puking his guts out, vowing never to do it again, and then, the next weekend, doing it again. As a teenager, in order to get money for booze and time off from work to drink it, he had a friend break his arm with a baseball bat. Drunk, he didn’t feel it. Afraid that his arm wasn’t broken, told him to hit him again. He woke up in the hospital with his arm broken in three places. To escape the law he joined the navy, where he got paid to drink full-time. Discharged, he married, had kids, and his life went to hell. One morning he went out to his car and found a child’s bicycle smashed against his front fender. He had no memory of what happened. The police showed up. He’d hit a little girl, broken her leg. Another morning he awoke to find his wife lying unconscious on the bed, blood all over. Again he remembered nothing. In an alcoholic blackout, he’d beaten her with a Bruins hockey stick. She took the children and left.

  I’d heard this story often as a doctor, and knew the ending: jail, or institutions like Misery and Candlewood, or death. My attention wandered to Jill, from whom I’d gotten another postcard: an immense radio telescope strung like a gargantuan spiderweb from peak to peak in Arecibo, Puerto Rico.

  Went up! Moved on. Back soon.

  Loveya Jill.

  Puerto Rico? I thought she was in the Galápagos.

  ‘… and so I got my wife and kids back and graduated from college,’ the Irishman said. ‘I never saw college in my future – hell, I never saw a future in my future. I was work-in’, goin’ to meetin’s, doin’ good. But a month ago, after I was six years sober, my son got in trouble with the law and I got involved pullin’ strings for him. I cut down on meetin’s. Stopped callin’ my sponsor. One night I found myself in a bar and sat down for a drink or twenty.’ Everybody laughed. ‘I was off and runnin’. My sponsor got me in here. One thing I learned: if you’re in recovery from alcohol and drugs, it’s a good idea to stay sober.’ More laughter. ‘Anyway, my insurance runs out today and I call the insurance girl in Tucson and tell her I need to stay. She goes no. I go, “So what do I do?” She goes, “Just between you and me, go out and start drinkin’, and we’ll call it relapse and authorize you to go back in.”’ Big laughter. ‘So for any of you sittin’ out there thinkin’ it’s not possible, I’m here to tell you it
is possible. If I can do it, you can do it. This program is the only place that never told me I had to go seek “outside help.” What helped me is this: don’t sit here thinkin’, “I’m better than him” or “I’m worse than him,” see if you can see how “I’m like him.” Like they say in the fellowship: “Identify, don’t compare.”’

  Malik nudged me in the ribs. I nodded.

  ‘… and so, if no-one today told ya they loved ya, tough shit, don’t drink.’ Big laughter. ‘Before I leave, I gotta make one more amends.’ He scanned the room, and his eyes found mine. ‘When I first got here, I knocked into a young doctor. On purpose. Sorry, Doc.’ I nodded back. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Amazing,’ I said to Malik as we left.

  ‘Yeah. At a meeting, you usually hear something that hits home.’

  ‘Malik?’ It was Frankie. ‘Return-to-Work Group.’ Malik nodded.

  ‘Wait a second,’ I said. ‘What do I do about Schlomo?’

  ‘Get Zoe and Lily to meet, and to take action with you.’

  ‘I tried. They won’t.’

  ‘Try again, ’cause now they will.’

  ‘Why? Nothing’s changed.’

  ‘You have. You’re different.’

  ‘I can’t see it.’

  ‘That’s how you’re different. The self can’t see its little deaths. You only see changes through the eyes of others – how they act with you, what they see in you.’ He smiled. I smiled back. ‘Click.’ I knew he was thinking, Like you and me now.

  ‘Like you and me now?’ I asked.

  ‘See? Congratulations, Basch: you’re finally catching up to where you are.’ We laughed. ‘Just make sure,’ he said, ‘when you meet with Zoe and Lily, that you’re not sitting there covering up your spirit with any bullshit concepts in your head.’

  The thunderheads over the mountains meant the end of spring. It was the next day, and Zoe again was late for her appointment. As I sat looking out the window at the storm clouds, it was as if I had opened a file cabinet in my mind. I kept seeing the whole year’s worth of my meetings with Zoe in vivid detail. Every moment was there, intact. But for that first night when I’d admitted her to Misery with Malik and had felt the ‘click,’ my work with her had been a mostly frustrating attempt to locate her and respond to her, and her to me. She didn’t know that she had saved me, by showing up at my house that night. At every moment, in each meeting, I had pretty well hidden myself from her.