Mount Misery

by Samuel Shem

  Gilda and Hannah took their leave, sadly, with fading embraces and promises to keep in touch. We watched them, as burdened as pack mules, disappear down the arroyo of Departure toward their flight to Wyoming.

  Bronia was still standing in the crowd at Air India. She didn’t seem to have moved. As we watched, a large Indian family draped in silk shoved her aside.

  Malik and I were alone. I felt our time as precarious as quicksilver. I had a tremendous urge to talk, to ask everything, fast.

  Then the strangest thing happened.

  We just sat there side by side.

  We just sat there.

  Eyes open to the madness of the airport, and then beyond, to the lights of the circling planes blinking in the hazy summer night like the fireflies of Tuscany that had lit up Cherokee’s heart for a brief moment a year before, we sat there in silence together.

  ‘Time to go, love.’ Bronia was standing before us with a wheelchair.

  A wheelchair? Malik? This friend of mine who, my first month in Misery – it seemed a second ago now – had been chasing down every ball Mr K. had hit, and with that hoisting-a-turkey-onto-a-truck stroke, was somehow getting it back, now unable to walk? Oh God.

  I wheeled him through the frantic crowd to the metal detector. This was it.

  ‘Let me know where you are,’ I said, ‘so we can keep in touch.’

  ‘You too.’

  ‘Wish I knew what I’ll be doing.’

  He nodded. ‘About “doing”?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘We’ll both be doing the same thing, kid.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Learning.’

  ‘Learning what?’

  ‘To die well.’

  A last hug. Bones. He got up out of the wheelchair, walked slowly through the metal detector, and joined Bronia on the other side. She gestured him to get back in, but he started to walk. He walked a few steps. A little out of breath, he stopped, and turned to wave. I waved back. He turned away again and walked a few slow steps, coughing, and walked a few more. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. He was the most important organism on the face of the earth right then. The love between us was stretching and stretching to thinner and thinner stuff, until it was as fragile as a filament of breath, and as unbreakable.

  As I watched, he bent down, as he had the first day I’d met him and had done so often in the course of this miserable year that I’d stopped noticing it, bent down and picked up a piece of litter. Holding it in his hand, he walked on.

  CANYON DE CHELLY

  ‘The planning took place on the top of the Beautiful Goods.

  They planned how the strong Earth’s Heart should be formed;

  How the Mixed Chips should be used, and

  How the Sacred Mountain should be made.

  How the Sacred Mountain should be made,

  Like the Most-High-Power-Whose-Ways-Are-Beautiful.’

  —NAVAJO MOUNTAIN CHANT

  Twenty-two

  TOGETHER WE WATCH the Navajo woman pass by. She seems to come suddenly out of the high desert, a lean black dog following after. White-haired, bronze face weathered, she wears a long purple skirt and brown leather vest. Her blouse is the bright red of arterial blood. Gold lightning flashes across it. Silver and turquoise, like water and sky, are around her neck. A golf umbrella, sectored blue and white, and proclaiming CITIBANK, shades her. She walks past us without eye contact and slips through what seems solid sandstone at the mouth of the trail down into the canyon, her black dog following. As suddenly as they have come, they are gone.

  ‘Did you see that?’ Berry asks. ‘The way she just came out of nowhere and then moved through that rock?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, stroking her cheek. ‘Like a mirage.’

  I’m leaning back against a boulder. Berry is lying against me, her hair nestled into my chin. Lizzie Qun, naked, is asleep on her chest, her morning bottle, interrupted by sleep, in one hand. The other hand clutches the edge of Berry’s bra, white lace in tiny fingers. To feel the sun, Berry has opened her blouse to the waist. Her breasts lift and lower Lizzie’s head with each breath.

  We are sitting on the ground near the canyon rim. The late-June morning sun is clear and warm and revving up to hot. We sit on Lizzie’s green quilt covered with purple birds with triangle yellow beaks and rounded bottoms like toy boats. Our quilt is spread amidst the scrub. As far as the eye can see is rough cracked land, sagebrush, rock and red dune, and clattering sky. On the horizon, a hint of buttes. Above them, dark clouds. We are over a mile high.

  ‘We were right to choose this,’ I say. ‘It’s so solid. Basic. What a relief.’

  ‘Really. Two Jews, a Chinese baby, and a Navajo woman – out in the middle of a desert.’

  ‘It’s your normal American family, on the way to their new home.’

  We laugh. Lizzie stirs. She’s eight months and four days. She was four months when we met her, and now it’s four months and four days that we’ve had her. The balance of her lifetime has shifted – she’s been with us more than she’s been with anyone else. Berry and I went back a second time to China, to Changsha, in Hunan Province, to adopt her from Social Welfare Center Number One. We carried her to the ninth floor of the Xiangjiang Hotel while her passport and adoption papers were processed. Having crashed from our infertility, we’d had doubts about adoption. But then, leaning into life, we’d said, ‘Yes.’

  Lizzie has a round face with plump cheeks and a mouth made of rose petals. That first time we saw her in the orphanage, we were taken with her eyes. Swaddled so she couldn’t much move, she must have lived through her vision. She touches everything with her eyes, as the blind touch everything with their other senses. Her eyes are shaped like teardrops set on their sides. The irises are as dark as the pupils, so that even in the bright desert sunlight you can’t see where the matter of the iris ends and the emptiness of the pupil begins. Her eyes give an illusion of wisdom. Four-hundred-year-old eyes. Malik eyes. Her face is so familiar to us already that non-Asian babies seem foreign. We can’t stop kissing her.

  Yesterday we arrived at Fort Defiance, Arizona, the regional seat of the Indian Health Service, to start our two years of service, I as a doctor, Berry as a teacher and child psychologist. I’ll be doctoring a lot of alcoholics and drug addicts. It’s been almost a year since I was fired from Misery.

  ‘Shall we open the letter now?’ Berry asks.

  Awaiting our arrival here yesterday were several letters and postcards. One letter was from India, Dalhousie, in the Himalayas. The handwriting was unfamiliar. I knew it concerned Malik.

  ‘No,’ I say, ‘let’s wait till we’re at the ruins, down in the canyon. They say it’s a sacred place.’

  ‘Can I make a suggestion, hon?’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘Breathe.’

  I laugh and do so. ‘Breathe,’ Malik had always said. ‘Find the breath.’

  This morning in U.S. News & World Report, the issue devoted to ‘The Best Doctors and Hospitals in America,’ they said that the best psychiatric hospital was McLean but the second best was Mount Misery, and the Best Administrative Psychiatrist in America was Dr Lloyal von Nott, and that among the ‘Fifty Best Psychiatrists Under Thirty-Five’ was Dr Winthrop Winthrop.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Berry asks. Startled, I wonder how she does it, always seems to know. I tell her what had come into my mind. She says, a little sharply, ‘Can’t you just be here, with us?’

  ‘I want to, but that magazine set my mind spinning like crazy. They call those jokers the best?’

  ‘So what else is new? It’s called the “normal world,” right? We’re here to find an alternative. Remember?’

  ‘But it’s outrageous!’

  ‘Apucha! Kee-ka!’

  Lizzie is awake, looking at us, sensing the tension. Berry sits her up. Perfect balance, legs crossed. A little Buddha.

  ‘Play with your daughter. She doesn’t know the meaning of that word.’

  ‘She doesn
’t know any words yet.’

  ‘Look at her. She wants her dad to be with her. Play with her. I’ll clean up.’

  As I look at her, Lizzie sees me looking, gives a yelp, and smiles. Smiles not only with her mouth but with her whole body, fat shoulders scrunching and arms lifting toward me and fingers grasping not just me but my seeing her – her seeing my seeing. As I join her in this seeing-play, something melts in me, an edge dissolves and all at once I’m with her. The small tight ball of my self breaks apart, letting something else expand. I’m in the world and of the world, feeling the morning sun on my back, the cool breeze on my cheeks, the sense of my wife and baby with me.

  ‘Lizzie Qun!’ I say. ‘Thank God for you!’

  ‘Scree-op!’

  ‘And for you,’ I say to Berry, appreciating how long we’ve been together, how hard we’ve tried to walk the walk together, how together we have finally crossed the divide that separates the sterile from the fertile. Tears come to her eyes, blurred by my own.

  ‘Hey!’

  Startled, Berry and I look around. Who said that?

  Lizzie? We stare at each other.

  ‘Her first word?’ I ask

  ‘Lizzie?’ Berry asks. ‘Did you say “Hey”?’

  ‘Scree-op! Amut!’

  We laugh.

  Berry squeezes my hand. ‘C’mon, love. Let’s hike on down.’

  Lizzie squeals with delight when she sees me take out the Tough Traveler backpack, her big blue friend. I lift her up, and despite the weight, feel light, as if I too am being lifted. We walk to the edge of the canyon.

  It takes my breath away – Berry’s too; I hear her ‘Wow!’ – the canyon stretching on and on as far as the eye can see and down so far that the sheep look like toys on a child’s blanket.

  I’m speechless, jolted out of myself into a perception that’s free of any doctrine of a landscape or even of perception itself, a perception of what is. As Malik had shown me, sometimes in therapy you chance upon the real person right there with you, right there right then without bullshit, and I can almost hear Malik’s tough, gym rat’s voice telling me:

  ‘Live your understanding, kid, right now, or it’ll destroy you.’

  We start on down the trail into the canyon, toward the ruins said to be sacred. The baby on my back, nipple to her lips, starts exchanging formula for air.

  * * *

  The white house ruin faces us, across the riverbed from where we sit. There on the sandy bank of the river is a small grove of cottonwoods and aspens. In this lap of shade, a Navajo man sells jewelry spread out on the hood of his pickup truck. Lifting up above the green tufts of the trees, our eyes are drawn to the cave.

  The cave is set in the cliff face like a dark teardrop set on its side. Our eyes search the blackness. The Anasazi, the ‘Old People,’ the humans first here tens of thousands of years ago, built these dwellings of wood and fired mud. The lower row of dwellings are faded rose, the color of the cliff. Ladders lead up from their flat roofs to the doorways of another house, set back a little, like a hat set back on a head. This topmost dwelling is white, still white after millennia. It shines through the shadows. The current crop of humans have named it ‘the White House.’

  Earlier this morning we read several of the letters and postcards that had been awaiting our arrival.

  One postcard showed, front-on, the towering bow of a freighter riding low in rough seas. The bow, fluted from a sharp edge at the bottom to an elegant furl at the top, was crashing down on a rough swell that lifted the foam almost up to its name: Akatsuki Maru. There in its path was a tiny rubber life raft with an outboard motor, its name: Greenpeace. Standing in the life raft, wearing orange rough-weather slickers upon which was drawn the three-pronged, propeller-shaped symbol for radioactive death, are two men. On the other side of the card, the message:

  Dickheads Battle Plutonium Death-Ship!

  Wish you were here.

  Love, Thorny.

  From Jamaica came a postcard of a fat tourist wearing a crappy straw hat, perched on a thin donkey. On the flip side:

  There’s a lotta life out there, man,

  But you gotta open your eyes to see it,

  And then it is Ideal. Be cool. Love, Henry.

  From Hannah in Wyoming there was a long letter handwritten on ‘100% tree-free, chlorine-free, acid-free EcoPaper, made of hemp fiber – which requires only one-fourth of the land needed by the same amount of wood – and cereal straw, a by-product of grain production. I thought you’d like it because from the 1st century on, Chinese craftspeople created beautiful papers made from hemp, straw, and common plants.’ Hannah was seeing patients as a lay analyst, and doing a lot of work with her Jungian rodeo-archetype analyst. Things were going well with Gilda and the livestock, though better with the livestock. ‘Gilda and I are making fairly beautiful music together, although there are problems. Loveyakid, H.’

  My mother in Columbia was full of news about her life and golf, and about how nice my father’s tombstone looked. Once, when my father was alive, she had pulled me aside and said that what she wanted on her own tombstone was an arrow pointing to his tombstone and the words:

  He Pushed Me Into This.

  Now she had mellowed. She had chosen a single stone for them both.

  I asked Berry, ‘If you had on your tombstone, “She Was Wonderful at Relationships,” would that be enough for you?’

  ‘Yes and no.’

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘It’s good, but I’d want a second line, something like, “And She Was a Good President Too.’” We laughed. ‘How ’bout you?’

  ‘“He Was Enough.’”

  ‘Oh boy.’

  From Viv, in Esalen, California, came a note on stationery crowded with flowers:

  Cowboy,

  Misery downsized and they put Communications under Security. I was fired. They were scared of Primo and the rest of the old Security so they herded them into a room under false pretenses and then surrounded the room with the new Security – an outside group – and fired them and opened the door and they had to walk through the gauntlet. In a ‘total-quality-control’ effort to make Misery ‘leaner and meaner’ they laid off 40% of the workforce. Nash and Lloyal both got big raises, Nash got $234,000 and Lloyal $432,000. I’m using my savings to do the human potential movement thing. Hot tubs ’n’ all. Primo sends his best.

  Love, Viv.

  Poppa Doc, the analyst I’d never gone back to, sent a bill on a note: When you look into a very small looking glass, you see only yourself.

  The final letter we read last night was overnight mail from Zoe, telling us about the last days of the trial of Schlomo Dove.

  Had there ever been a trial so funny?

  Berry and I had been in the courtroom up until the jury went out, when we had to leave for Arizona. Over and over again, like everyone else in the courtroom, we’d found ourselves cracking up with laughter.

  A. K. Lowell was first to bring suit for malpractice. Schlomo created many delays. Through his lawyer, a woman named Joanne Green who looked like a sweet young thing but had the soul of a crocodile, Schlomo took both the high road and the low. First he tried to bribe A.K. Then he tried to threaten A.K. Finally he went public with slime on A.K. He responded to the Globe’s stories on two other ‘anonymous victims’ – Lily and Zoe – by calling them ‘a Misery conspiracy’ and reiterating his claim that ‘Schlomo is the real victim here.’ Then he tried to settle with A.K. out of court.

  A.K. did not budge. The threat of my going public with her ledger was too great. A date was set for trial.

  Schlomo’s going public made jury selection difficult. He’d done the talk shows. Everyone had been entertained by him in print and on TV. Schlomo was great on TV. Selection of twelve reasonable, schizoid, reclusive folk who hadn’t seen him, or had seen him and had not formed an opinion about him, took time, especially as Schlomo insisted that the only real ‘jury of Schlomo’s peers’ would be a dozen top Freudian analysts.
Anyone else would be grounds for appeal. It was said that his alleged patient, Dershowitz, was watching.

  Twice, just as the trial was about to start, Schlomo pulled the old Mafia trick of crushing chest pain, landing him in intensive care in my old hospital, ‘the House of God.’ The second crushing chest pain resulted in the judge convening the trial in the hospital. Schlomo made a terrific recovery. The trial began.

  Schlomo’s defense was that it was all fantasy. A.K.’s contention was that it was all reality. Both called in world-expert forensic psychiatrists as witnesses, who drew totally opposite conclusions, along the lines that you would expect.

  When Schlomo testified he was terrific. Wise, funny, sad, angry. A man of the people. An esteemed professor high above the fray. Mesmerizing.

  Even I, knowing the truth, half believed him. It was weird, just how convincing he could be. Not only was he totally entertaining, with his Borscht Belt humor about the accusations, but he came across as a victim himself, filled with – his word, said with a fist clenched over his heart – tsouris. This, he explained, was a Yiddish word meaning total grief. He gave the derivation and usage in great and teary detail.

  Schlomo conveyed to us all not only his resilient humor, but also his pain, his heartache for everyone involved, especially ‘my poor bubbie, Dr Lowell.’ He spoke from his kishkees. He laughed through his tears. He dressed so sloppily, looked so ugly, sounded like such a poor schlemiel, it seemed impossible that a woman would fall for him, especially not a woman as strong and sure of herself as A.K. By the end of his testimony I thought he had the jury eating out of his hand. Even the judge, a stern old New Englander named Shipley, tall as a tree and with a face like the Old Man of the Mountain, laughed twice, and once seemed on the edge of tears.

  A.K., unfortunately, came across as she was: cold, unknowable and unknown, making no real contact with the jurors. With her soul so hidden, it seemed that she just might be crazy, making all this up. Especially when her stiff, guarded words were seen against the backdrop of Schlomo’s spilling his guts in such a seemingly sincere, convincing, and entertaining way.