Mount Misery

by Samuel Shem

  She was right in my face. I felt overwhelmed with dread. She sighed.

  ‘God save me from a guy who sees me as his mother. Maybe the only sensible position to take is that guys are aliens. I mean if you start there, you don’t expect them to change – you can’t expect to change a dog into a cat, right? You stop trying. There are a few mutants – I thought you might be one, that first day you walked onto the ward the wrong way – you seemed wild, rebellious – but now—’

  ‘Psychoanalysis is rebellious.’

  She stared at me in disbelief. ‘Maybe there are mutants and I’m just not meeting them? Some guys you can have bridge conversations with, at first. But sooner or later you find yourself beating your head against a wall. Know what I’ve learned, from all these guys?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You have a lot of energy when you break up with them, because you stop trying to make a dog into a cat. I mean you reach a point – like now with you – where everything stops, like when you’re pedaling along on a bicycle and the chain slips off and all of a sudden you’re pedaling air, too fast, and alone, and going nowhere. That’s us now.’

  ‘You have some feelings about “us now”?’

  ‘Go home. With you gone, I’m gonna feel like incredibly depressed, but I won’t feel as alone.’ She stared. ‘You didn’t even loosen your tie.’

  I got up and started out.

  ‘Roy? I can’t stand you right now. But I still probably love you?’

  Boom. I thought of telling her that my dad had died and that I needed to cry and that I loved her for her straight unleashed humanness but then I was a child standing at the top of our stairs in Columbia my mother at the bottom and I was bored stiff stuck inside on a sunny day hearing myself asking my mother, ‘WhadamI gonna do now? WhadamI gonna do now?’ as if she knew and suddenly I felt wetness in my eyes. Jill saw it and came and hugged me and there were tears in her own eyes as she asked:

  ‘What? Can you tell me?’

  Everything in me wanted to tell her but the harsh chorus in my head turned my tongue to stone – stone tongue stone mouth stone teeth teeth teeth – and I felt my heart if not break then attack a little like my pop’s and I shook my head and two more tears popped out and feeling her squeeze my hand really hard I just left.

  Constant foul-smelling rain was driving people crazy, but my inner world was warm and dry. I awoke before the light that next morning, a Sunday. Feeling an early-morning chaos of loneliness, I decided to go in to Thoreau and read some Freud. The Family Unit was now deserted. All the patients had left Against Medical Advice. It was just after seven when I walked upstairs to the office I was using next to A.K.’s, unlocked my door and went in. The empty rooms in the magnificent old building, the unambivalent woodwork and brick, and the silence were a comfort. I sat free-associating, and then took down one of my crisp new robin’s-egg-blue volumes of The Collected Works and turned to ‘Totem and Taboo.’

  ‘Dr Basch?’

  Startled, I looked up. A tall slender woman was standing in the door. Her light brown hair was cut short. She was all in black, and despite her terrified eyes she was stunningly beautiful.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Lily Putnam, remember?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Cherokee shot himself.’

  ‘Oh God! Is he dead?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Shit!’ In shock, I stared at her, trying to see her but failing. She walked to a chair and sat.

  ‘I … I just had my session with Schlomo, and I saw your light on here, thought I’d tell you in person. I know how much he cared about you. Thought the world of you, actually.’

  ‘What happened?’ I said loudly, as if she were a long way away and I had to shout to reach her.

  ‘He and I had been more and more distant. Yesterday afternoon he came to me and asked, “Do you still love me?” “Yes,” I said. He said, “But not enough. Or maybe it’s me, my core ingrato, my ungrateful heart.” I asked what he meant but the girls came in – they were late for a swim meet – I had to drive them. He said he’d be out for a while. I left. And then … I got a call … he’d driven the Jeep to the ocean, out to his favorite wildlife refuge. And … and then … and put a gun in his mouth … shot himself.’

  ‘He had a gun?’

  ‘I told him I did not want a gun in the house, and he’d promised he wouldn’t, but I knew he’d gotten a permit. I thought it was all part of his flirtation with suicide.’

  ‘Suicide?’ Suddenly I felt sick. Lies! All these lies! What else had he been lying about?

  ‘As you know, he was obsessed with suicide. Talked about it all the time. For years, really. Talking about driving into abutments and calculating which hotel rooms he could jump from and not land on anyone below. Even though you were working on it with him, it didn’t get any better. He seemed even more obsessed about it lately. Schlomo reassured me – I mean that he was in good hands, as far as trying to deal with his suicide, with you.’

  I felt a wave of nausea. Words and phrases sprang to mind – signs of his secret, which he had never told me, in fact had denied, early on when I’d asked him, before A.K. had started to supervise me. Since then, whenever I’d brought up the question to A.K., telling her that I wanted to ask Cherokee directly about whether he was suicidal, A.K. had told me not to. ‘Don’t ask!’ she’d said firmly. ‘Listen for it in the material.’ I’d blown it. I felt devastated.

  ‘Did he leave a note?’

  ‘No. Just his life insurance policies, and instructions how to collect.’

  ‘Life insurance?’

  ‘Two policies. Worth a million each. And each had the standard clause, that the policy has to be held for over two years or there is no payment if you die by suicide.’

  ‘Two years?’

  ‘Was—’ She stopped, the reality catching her by the throat. She cried, and cried out, ‘Was yes—’

  ‘Yesterday?’ She nodded, sobbing. After a while she quieted. We sat still.

  She sighed. ‘I’d best go. Lots of things to do.’ She made no effort to move.

  ‘I … I’m so sorry. I’m in shock. I’ll call you. We’ll talk.’

  ‘We … you and I … we both tried as hard as we could. I was more worried about him the other night, that’s why I called you … Viv said you were busy. That you would call back.’

  ‘I …’

  ‘No matter. Wouldn’t have helped.’ She got up and walked slowly toward the door.

  ‘Wait.’ I went to her and put my arms around her and hugged her. Her short light brown hair brushed my chin. She was sobbing. I was too shocked to cry. I felt the heightened sensuality that floods us in those moments when death is all around, when we feel that big callused fist.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said, easing away. ‘I’m sure you did your best. He always talked about you with such fondness. I’ll let you know about the funeral.’

  ‘How are the girls?’

  ‘Hope, the eldest, says she hates him. Little Kissy isn’t saying anything.’ She turned away quickly and, weeping, hurried out.

  I sat there stunned, going over every piece of the disaster, feeling sick to my stomach at my failure to dig out his secret. ‘A note comes due,’ he had said. ‘Their children need a rich estate.’

  Terror. I felt like I was suffocating, as if my breath were coming in through a needle-thin tube. I had to get out of there! I grabbed my coat and hat and ledgers and left my office, for some reason turning the other way down the hall, past A.K’s office. The outer door was ajar. So was the inner. I knocked. No answer. I went in.

  On her ornate couch was a body. Sprawled, legs adangle down, head tilted back so the face was out of sight, the white jaw raised above the slit throat.

  Time slowed down. I clicked into real doctoring, found myself at the body, searching for a pulse, hoping for a pulse for poor Oly Joe. Beside his cheek was a fuzzy yellow duck, blotched with blood. Thready pulse. His kid’s heart was trying hard. He’d gotten both jugulars,
but had missed the carotids – novice throat slitters tend to tilt the head back to cut, so the carotids retract in, becoming harder to hit.

  I stopped the bleeding and breathed him and did all the other medical things to save what was left of his life and called Security, stat. Oly Joe hadn’t been bleeding all that long, and looked like he would live, although his breathing was ominously shallow, as if from primitive regions of his brain stem. He must have sneaked in on this sleepy Sunday morning, knowing that no-one would be around.

  My body felt all watery. One of my mother’s most powerful superstitions was that deaths come in threes. I had often heard from my inpatients how, in a particular life – in-explicably and seemingly chosen by a malevolent God – deaths had piled upon deaths, tragedies upon tragedies, all within a short space of time, sending even the most seemingly solid people spinning down to insanity, or, as in Toshiba at Christmas, violence and abuse. This is the kind of thing we go crazy from, or die slowly with.

  As I waited for help, sitting next to him on the couch, I saw how the blood had run out all over A.K.’s prized Freudian couch and tapestry, and Persian carpet. A bloodied straight razor lay on the floor. Then my eyes were drawn to a leather-bound ledger, lying open on the carpet. I bent to the ledger and read the last right-hand side entry:

  Oly Joe jumps off the couch, grabs me and rips off my skirt my panty hose spreads my thighs sticks his tongue into me. Then I take his sweet little boy farmer’s prick in my hands, cup his balls and …

  Below, scribbled in big adolescent letters and spattered with blood, was:

  She fucked me so fuck you all! Oly Joe.

  Gingerly I picked up the ledger, closed it, put it in my briefcase, and waited.

  Soon Primo arrived. With him were two members of the state police. They had been looking hard for Oly Joe Olaf because the night before he had stolen a car and driven to his old school, Simeon’s Rest. He was carrying with him an assault rifle and ammo, and had killed three people apparently at random. Two were students, a seventeen-year-old girl and a nineteen-year-old boy. The other was a professor of English literature. Others had been wounded. Oly Joe had vanished.

  We sent Oly Joe in an ambulance to Timmons General Hospital.

  I called A. K. Lowell. I told her what had happened. I said nothing to her about the ledger. She said nothing to me about anything.

  The governor of the state, questioned later that day at a boar hunt on a private game preserve about how a seventeen-year-old boy who had just been discharged the day before from a mental hospital for threatening violence could walk into a gun shop and purchase an assault rifle and ammo without a hitch, said:

  ‘There will always be people who are crackers, who do these things. The problem isn’t not having better gun laws, the problem is not having the death penalty.’

  By the next evening it was clear just how brain-damaged poor Oly Joe Olaf was, and most likely would be for the rest of his life. His breathing centers were in fact only up to the level of amphibia, and so he was on a respirator. The MRI of his brain showed damage that in all probability would forever keep him from speaking or reading or writing or walking or standing trial. His family asked that he be transferred as soon as possible to a chronic care facility that happened to be located near them, out in the farm country of rural Missouri.

  My last day on Thoreau, a few days later, I was about to leave my turret for my tennis-and-dinner date with A. K. Lowell when the phone rang.

  ‘Roy?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Lenny. How are you?’

  ‘Bad.’

  ‘Yeah, me too. I been out of town, and just heard. Unbelievable.’

  ‘It’s the worst,’ I said numbly. I had been in shock ever since Lily Putnam had told me that Cherokee was dead. In shock, feeling nothing.

  ‘The absolute worst. We fucked up so bad!’ He started to cry, and then had a fit of coughing. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I need to talk. I’ll come over.’

  ‘Can’t. I’m on my way out.’

  ‘No, no, you don’t understand. It’s our fault. We’re to blame. I shoulda picked up, more, how you wouldn’t let me see Cherokee – and hell, you shoulda asked me to see him too. We both fucked up. We gotta talk.’

  ‘Sorry, but I can’t.’ I felt frozen, below zero, too low to feel anything. I knew I should see him and that not to see him now would be sick, but to actually face him, to face into all the feelings, at that moment was incomprehensible.

  ‘What’s so important?’

  ‘You don’t want to know.’

  ‘C’mon, c’mon.’

  ‘I’m going over to A.K.’s.’

  ‘You shittin’ me?’

  ‘No. How ’bout tomorrow?’

  ‘We gotta talk now.’

  I felt a tiny opening, like the unwilling opening of an eye to an eclipse. But to see would be to burn, and I closed down harder. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘For today.’

  ‘Tomorrow’s too late. I need to see you now. If we talk a little, you can help me with this, and I can help you too.’ He sounded desperate. ‘It’s now or never.’

  ‘Aw c’mon, Malik.’

  ‘OK,’ he said, suddenly matter-of-fact. ‘Got a pencil and paper?’

  ‘Wait a sec.’ I got a number 2 and a Misery envelope. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Write down this number: 555–0100. Got it?’

  ‘What do you mean got it? – that’s your home number, Malik.’

  ‘Right. Y’got it?’

  ‘Yeah, but—’

  ‘Now burn it.’

  ‘What the—’ Click. The phone went dead.

  Tennis with A. K. Lowell was infuriating; she was a topspin lobber. I would smash a forehand down the line and rush the net, and she, on her own baseline, would get to it and lob it back high over my head, with enough topspin to bounce even farther away from me than I had expected. She parked her tall, muscular body on her own baseline, and even when I tried to dink it softly just over the net, she would either anticipate me and be there and lob it high back, giving her enough time to settle back in on her baseline, or not even bother to try to get it, conceding the point rather than losing her baseline dignity.

  At first it was a challenge to try to adjust to her game, but then, after hitting a few perfect shots that rifled low over the net and then watching the ball sail up off her racket with lazy ease and plop down near my own baseline, its topspin making it hard to return with any control, it was less a challenge than a cause. As I tried harder and harder to penetrate her maddening system, it became less a cause than an irritation, a perversion of the spirit of the game in the name of her winning. I lost the first set 5–7, the second 2–6, and in the middle of the third – after I hit a particularly vicious smash down the backhand line that I knew she could never get to, and just to make sure rushing the net to protect the angles, to see her with an almost lazy backhand flick lob it high high high over my head as if daring me to try to chase it, and I gauging to see is it going out or not and figuring yes but wanting to make sure to be there, racing back, back, seeing it come down just on my baseline and then, because of its height, carom off even farther back so that I had to chase it right to the edge of the bubble dome of the indoor court and with a wild flail backward over my head manage to hit it before I crashed face first into the mesh fabric, only to see it drop short on my side of the net, her point – in the middle of the third set I lost it completely and just tried to finish the set without going psychotic. ‘You can tell everything about a person by how they play a sport.’ Love-6.

  Thank God for dinner. We sat at a massive oak table in a massive room paneled with dark wood which, in the candlelight, looked as impenetrable as ebony. The house was a castlelike Tudor. The neighborhood, the yard, the house, the furnishings – all were High Episcopal suburban. A.K.’s new husband, Robert, was much younger than she, and a hairdresser. He cooked, served, poured wines – white and red and dessert – cleared, and did the di
shes.

  Strange, all of it. Strange too the way that A.K. seemed no different at home than at work. She used the Three Techniques and complex silences on Robert. Strangest of all was how she treated her five-year-old son Mo Ali – short for Moishe Alistair. Mo Ali seemed a delightful boy, dressed in Oshkosh jeans and kid Nikes.

  ‘I saw ducks flying in the sky today,’ Mo Ali would say.

  ‘And what are your fantasies about ducks?’ A.K. would ask.

  ‘The ducks are going to Disney World.’

  ‘Yes, and what are your thoughts about Disney World?’

  ‘I think I want to go there can we please Mommy Robert said we could.’

  ‘And what are your feelings about Robert?’

  ‘I want to stand on his head in the pool till he drowns,’ Mo Ali said cheerfully, ‘and be with you all the time in bed. When someone’s depressed, Mommy, how come some of ’em kill themselves and some of ’em don’t?’

  A.K. would nod at me knowingly. I would nod back, feeling appalled.

  ‘“We’re three happy chappies,”’ Mo Ali sang out, ‘“with snappy serapes.”’

  ‘Three,’ A.K. said, nodding, ‘is Oedipal.’ I nodded back.

  Finally Robert took Mo Ali up to bed and A.K. invited me into her home office up under the skylight. The furniture was arranged to replicate as exactly as possible her office on Thoreau, with the same couch and chair and big desk with, on the left-hand side with its back to me, the same small framed photo and the four sharp number 2’s. We sat in silence.

  ‘I’ve always wondered,’ A.K. said finally, ‘how a man could walk to his own execution.’ Two seconds. ‘And why people cry at happy endings.’

  I stared down at the carpet for a while, an expensive antique Persian. I wanted to talk about all the disasters on the Family Unit, but I hesitated – to bring up something as ‘hot’ as suicide and murder would be like my hitting a scorcher cross-court, then rushing the net only to be lobbed over, then scurrying back, breathless and sweaty and pissed off. Finally I said, ‘I’m rotating off the Family Unit. I won’t be having supervision with you anymore.’