Mount Misery

by Samuel Shem

  At the last bong, A. K. Lowell entered, wearing a dark suit in a mannish cut and carrying a cigar. Following her was an anxious middle-aged woman in plain dark skirt, blue sweater, and sensible shoes. This was Faith Baltsburg, a social worker who was a world expert in money anxiety. A.K. and Faith took their seats. So far it reminded me of a daytime talk show, say Jenny Jones.

  ‘They’re all transvestites,’ I said to Malik.

  ‘Ha! Hahaha!’

  ‘Shh,’ hissed someone in front. ‘They’re starting.’

  Well, they were and they weren’t, because A.K. was laying out silence. The silence persisted. The Olafs looked at each other and at A.K. and Faith.

  ‘What’s supposed to happen now?’ Mrs Olaf asked of Faith.

  Faith said nothing.

  ‘Are we supposed to start talking, Faith?’ she asked again.

  Faith seemed chiseled out of granite, and said more nothing, although I saw an anxious flick of her eyes over to A.K., as if asking for guidance.

  ‘Doc, you want us to tell about Junior?’ Mr Olaf asked A.K.

  A.K. said nothing.

  ‘I said you want us to tell ’bout Junior?’ Mr Olaf repeated, loudly.

  A.K. said more nothing.

  ‘AIN’T YOU GONNA SAY NUTHIN’?’ Mr Olaf was now yelling.

  A.K. said about as much nothing as humanly possible.

  ‘Sheez. We come all the way from Missoura ’n’ you ain’t gonna say nothin’?’

  ‘No, they ain’t sayin’ nothin’, Pa,’ Oly Joe Junior said. ‘We have to talk.’

  ‘About what, son?’

  ‘Like whatever comes to mind.’

  ‘Oh,’ the father said, ‘OK.’ He settled back in his chair, placing his hands flat on his thighs the way farmers will do when there’s no internal-combustion engine present and they don’t feel really alive. He wrinkled his brow and proceeded to say what was coming to mind. Nothing.

  ‘Faith dear,’ Mrs Olaf said, ‘yesterday you told us that there was hope, for Oly Joe, for him goin’ back to school. What did you mean, “hope”?’

  Faith looked like she’d just been shot, her eyes darting quickly to A.K., who scowled at her and lit the cigar. Faith looked at the wall and said nothing.

  ‘Isn’t that what you said, dear? Hope? That there’s hope for him?’

  Everyone was looking at Faith, who, shaken and trembling with anxiety, in a voice devoid of anxiety, said, ‘And what are your fantasies about me?’

  ‘I’m leavin’,’ Oly Joe Junior said, slowly uncurling from his chair.

  ‘Honey, please,’ his mother said, ‘if you walk out now, I feel you’ll never come back.’

  ‘To this place? Hell no.’

  ‘No, honey, to us.’ She began to weep. The little girl with the fuzzy duck started to cry too. The mother held her, rocking. It was really sad.

  Oly Joe curled up in his chair once again and fell silent. He and his father listened to Mrs Olaf and the little girl crying together.

  Suddenly A.K. cleared her throat. I looked at my watch. Eight minutes gone. ‘And is it your fantasy,’ A.K. said, in a tone of impeccable neutrality and to no-one in particular but rather to a figure up near the ceiling which the smoke from her cigar had formed, say a heifer, or perhaps a hog, ‘that if your father were dead, you would love your mother more?’

  Oly Joe seemed stunned. He uncurled and started crawling toward the door.

  ‘Oly Joe?’ Mrs Olaf cried. ‘Oly Joe? Don’t crawl out the door!’

  Oly Joe crawled out the door.

  Mrs Olaf handed the little girl and her fuzzy duck to Mr Olaf and walked out the door after Oly Joe.

  Mr Olaf and the little girl sat there for a while. So did the duck.

  ‘Pa,’ she said, ‘I have to go to the bathroom.’

  ‘OK, sugar,’ Mr Olaf said, and turned to Faith. ‘Pardon me, ma’am, but where’s the bathroom?’

  Faith was dying to tell where the bathroom was, but a quick, anxious glance to A.K. solidified her resolve to keep this information strictly to herself.

  ‘We’re simple folk,’ Mr Olaf said. ‘We don’t understand this.’ He carried the little girl and her fuzzy duck out. A.K. and Faith sat there as if everyone who wasn’t there anymore was still there.

  Silence, one of Surely They Won’t Sit There Till The Hour Is Up?

  Silence, one of They Sure Will.

  I heard soft snoring beside me from Malik. Soon I slept too.

  Bong bong bong bong bong bong bong bong bong bong.

  I awoke from a dynamite sleep to find the lights going on on our side and going off on their side and people shifting their chairs into a circle.

  ‘Solini?’ I cried out, surprised that the little guy was there, even after his rotation with A.K. had ended.

  Startled, he jumped up in his loose-fitting dark suit, shaking his head in a ‘Don’t talk!’ gesture. He recinched his Misery tie. I felt sad.

  A.K. and Faith entered and sat down and led us with masterful authority into nothing happening.

  Malik played with the basketball, spinning it, fondling it, bouncing it twice. In the small room it made a big sound. No-one said anything.

  ‘The projective identifications onto the son,’ someone said, ‘were not introjected by father or mother, despite their being offered the Oedipal interpretation. The projective/introjective Oedipal Oscillator was the primary defense against the pre-Oedipal dynamic: the fuzzy duck.’

  What the fuck, I thought, does that mean? Malik rolled his eyes.

  The others seemed to know what that meant. There ensued a laborious discussion about this Oedipal Oscillator. It was impossible to comprehend what they were talking about. There were quotes from Freud and much mockery of the ‘simple folk’ who had been doing so badly as a family right before our eyes. Mockery turned to blame. The group was split about evenly: half blamed the mother for Oly’s psychopathology (‘She’s an engulfing/intrusive mother’), and half blamed the father (‘He’s a distant/sadistic father’). Just before the hour was up, A.K cleared her throat again. Everyone got tense, as if an order had gone out: ‘Cover your crotch!’

  A.K. fixed Faith with a muscular stare, and said, in an incredulous voice, ‘Your fantasy is there’s hope?’

  Faith, skewered, shook with anxiety. A wallet dropped from her hands, spilling credit cards, cash, and coins, which rolled, whined, and settled.

  Bong bong bong bong bong bong bong bong bong bong bong.

  Quickly the room emptied. Solini rushed past without a word.

  ‘What the hell was that?’ I asked Malik.

  ‘Psychoanalysis.’

  ‘But that family, they were really hurt. Why didn’t you say something?’

  ‘Deft, Basch, you gotta be deft.’ He sneezed. ‘’Nother Stim-U-Dent?’

  I started working it between an incisor and a molar. ‘But what are you doing here, Malik? I thought you were on an elective.’

  ‘Yeah, and I elected to do this. I’m the resident in charge of the ward for three months.’

  ‘You?’ I said. ‘But you despise this stuff!’

  ‘Yop. Analysis goes against everything I have faith in. Take every AA slogan, then take the opposite, you got psychoanalysis: Keep It Complicated, Last Things First, Hard Does It, Don’t Ask for Help. What bullshit.’

  ‘So why are you here?’

  He looked me straight in the eye. Behind those tinty lenses, the voltage went up. ‘Of all the people who supervised me my first year as a resident, A. K. Lowell did the most damage, to me and my patients. She is the worst!’

  ‘Worse than Heiler?’

  ‘Heiler’s a sweetheart compared to her. Heiler’s scared of her.’

  ‘But why? She doesn’t seem that bad. And everybody says she’s brilliant.’

  ‘That’s why. She seems brilliant. Seems to know what she’s doing, so that if only you could learn it, you’d be brilliant too. I hate her.’

  ‘I thought you don’t believe in hating people.’
>
  ‘I don’t. But I hate her. That’s why I’m here. Big-time challenge.’

  ‘She knows you feel this way?’

  ‘Yop.’

  ‘And she’s letting you take charge of her ward? Why?’

  ‘She thinks it shows how great an analyst she is. Thinks she’s being completely neutral and nonjudgmental, not taking a stand. ’Course, not taking a stand is taking a stand: that you’re not taking a stand. Not responding to a person is a cruel response, an evil response. Nothing drives a baby as crazy as a “stiff-faced” mother. Like those sweet Viennese being completely neutral as they watched the Nazis round up the Jews. A.K., and analysis, is about as judgmental as they come. When people look back, they’ll see Freud as one of the most destructive jokers of the century.’

  ‘Wait a second. You may not agree with him, but Freud was a genius.’

  ‘Destruction is not genius. Never.’

  ‘But look at his discoveries – the unconscious, dreams, childhood sexual—’

  ‘He stole most of ’em. Check out the reality, the facts coming out on Freud now – he lied, made up data, denied real data – harmed his patients more than he helped ’em. The worst thing is the Freudian view of the world: self self self!’ He wiped sweat from his brow. ‘How’s that for humility, eh?’

  ‘Sounded a bit more humble than usual, Malik.’

  ‘I don’t know how you do it, kid, get me going like that? Anyway, I’m here on a kind of humanitarian relief effort – tryin’ to prevent her from doing too much harm.’

  ‘To the patients?’

  ‘And to you.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Look what she did to Solini.’ He bounced the ball. ‘How ’bout a quick one-on-one?’

  ‘Is there time?’

  ‘Lots. That’s another reason I’m here – for a three-month rest. I’m feeling kinda tired out.’

  ‘You, tired?’ I asked. It seemed unthinkable. And then for some reason I started thinking of Berry, about its being over, at least for now, because when I got that it was really over, it felt awful. I wasn’t sleeping at night and was constantly exhausted and wondering should I call her up again and try to patch it up again, but nothing had changed, so how could I?

  ‘Burnt out,’ he said, ‘yeah. So this place is a chance to rest. See, there are only eight beds on Thoreau, and right now only four are filled. A.K. can’t keep patients in therapy.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Basch, Basch, you just saw! C’mon.’

  I followed him downstairs and out the door into air so January it was like inhaling slivers of ice, and over to his VW bus with the license plate reading BREATHE. We drove out of the valley that retained the ghostly shape of what it had once been – the eighth fairway of the Misery Links Golf Course – a tricky dogleg par four to an elevated green, the second shot over the dank cattails of Schlomo’s Outpatient Clinic in the corner of the lake – and then on top of the hill around the back of the Farben to the gym. Malik told me about the Family Unit. It had been funded by a federal grant from NASA, steered to Misery by an astronaut who’d come to A.K. happily married but claustrophobic. Through analysis, while remaining claustrophobic, he had left his wife and kids for a nineteen-year-old dancer and a new red Porsche. A.K. got the grant based on a paper in Anal. J. in which she argued the cost effectiveness of applying Freudian concepts to an entire family at once. Her famous paper was entitled: ‘The Freudian Family Driven by a Projective/Introjective Identification Oedipal Oscillator.’ The Oscillator was so abstruse a concept that it was said that if anyone other than A.K. understood it – and it was commonly doubted that A.K. did, entirely – it was the magical analyst whom Blair Heiler worshiped, Renaldo Krotkey. It was also said that Krotkey, struggling with the Oscillator, had said, ‘The only person who can understand this shit is Frau Kernberg.’ Frau Kernberg, a mythical figure in the analytic canon (said to have once met Freud), was old and wheelchair-bound in a continuous care facility called Conquistador, in Boca Raton, Florida. Only Krotkey, her disciple, was granted admission to her nursing home chamber.

  Now, with Malik, I asked, ‘What is it, this Oscillator?’

  ‘What is it? It’s horseshit, is what it is. Horseshit. It’s A.K.’s reach for fame. Shrinks specialize in their defects. A. K.’s is empathy.’

  ‘You’ve got to be joking.’

  ‘You’re not laughing. Primo and Viv told me all about A.K. Listen up.’

  It turned out that A. K. Lowell had grown up as Aliyah K. Loewenschteiner, the daughter of fine, upstanding kosher butchers in Queens. She’d been a terrific young woman of immense promise and even, in Viv’s words, ‘that certain something,’ until midway through her first year of psych residency here at Misery when she had gone under analysis with the head of the Freudian Institute – one Dr Schlomo Dove. Aliyah and Ike White had both been analyzed by Schlomo. In fact they had been in the same class in the institute, and the best of friends. During her years on the couch with Schlomo, Aliyah had been transformed totally: Loewenschteiner became Lowell, Jew became Episcopal, hooked nose became straight, long dark hair became lightened to chestnut-brown and cut short; she divorced her Jewish gastroenterologist husband and put her son under child Freudian analysis. ‘And she changed her personality,’ Malik said, ‘from – according to Viv – terrific, to this. Now she does it to others.’

  I wondered about this. Compared to the imbecilic DSM revolving door of Toshiba, A.K. didn’t seem that bad. At least she was trying to understand people, in long-term therapy.

  ‘You’re thinking, after Toshiba, she doesn’t seem all that bad, right?’

  ‘Jesus Christ, Malik! How the hell do you do that?’

  ‘Easy. I don’t.’ He winked. ‘She’s the worst. Wanna play H-O-R-S-E?’

  We started shooting baskets in the deserted century-old gym, where the yellow pine floor and walls stirred images of women in black bathing costumes and men in curled moustaches throwing medicine balls. We eased into that fluid ballet permitted to men in the presence of a hoop, and the whap whap of the ball on the hardwood echoed down through my adolescence of glory to the loneliness of my childhood and that first day of winter running up and up out into the crisp air toward the gym feeling light and free, free from the dusty sad rooms of my family, free to find a life with others, as buddies, on teams.

  After a while Malik called it quits. He was sneezing, out of breath. ‘Chest cold,’ he said as we sat on the floor cooling down. ‘The NASA grant – which, by the way, has CIA written all over it – lets teenagers get admitted to the Family Unit for free. The CIA must be trying to figure out how to crush the violence and drugs or something. Those bozos think Freud can help. Imagine! They oughta stick with psychics. Anyways, our job is to help these kids learn to live, play sports. Get that Oly Joe out for some hoop. Rough ’im up under those boards. So how y’doin, kid?’

  ‘Bad.’

  ‘That good, eh? What’s up?’

  I told him about Berry and Jill, and he listened in that electric way that made me feel, OK, it’s just part of the human condition and you’ll walk through it and maybe learn, but when I went on to talk about my dilemma with Cherokee and Lily and Schlomo, he wasn’t so reassuring.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me about this before?’ he asked.

  ‘You’ve been away. And he’s been doing OK, up till now.’

  ‘This is bad,’ he said. ‘Maybe real bad.’

  ‘Is it possible?’

  ‘’Course it is. Studies show that at least ten percent of shrinks are currently fucking their patients.’

  ‘A pig wouldn’t fuck Schlomo.’

  ‘But Schlomo might fuck a pig. Never underestimate the power of ugliness.’

  ‘Do you know him well?’

  ‘No. Funny, about me and Schlomo. I’ve always kept my distance, and so has he. Like we both know it’d be bad news. There’s no way of knowin’ the truth yet. So we have to keep our eyes peeled, keep tryin’ to get him and his wife to meet with you aga
in. But all you can do is try ’n’ help him, Cherokee.’

  ‘But I’m not getting anywhere! I feel stuck. I can’t move him from his obsession – I don’t know how therapy works.’

  ‘Therapy’s like life, therapy works like life works – no road maps, no instruction manuals. What moves therapy along is what moves good friends along: you like each other, feel understood by each other, know each other better. You can do more things because you feel your friend with you, and you want to see each other more. That warm feeling you carry, even when you’re apart. Zesty, y’know?’

  ‘Like now?’

  ‘Yop. Want me to see Cherokee?’

  ‘No,’ I said quickly.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, nodding his head, sensing my protective-ness. ‘I get it. Maybe you and I see him together?’

  ‘No, not right now.’ I felt that Malik was so, I don’t know, so immense, I didn’t want to be, in comparison, diminished. ‘Maybe sometime.’

  ‘OK. But be careful. With a guy like this, you never know. Let’s keep talking about him. And don’t go pawing around in his past, his childhood.’

  ‘Isn’t the past important?’