Mount Misery

by Samuel Shem

  ‘Hey, man, can I gitchu somethin’?’

  An African-American man, with keys. I jangled my keys, in the universal I’m-in-mental-health-too greeting. ‘I’m Dr Basch. From Mount Misery.’

  ‘Frederickson,’ he said. ‘Pleased to meetchu.’

  ‘I’m looking for Dr Malik.’

  ‘Bronia or L.A.?’

  ‘Either.’

  ‘Bronia’s back in Israel. Don’t know where Malik hisse’f is. He usually be stoppin’ by, every week or so. Ain’t seen him in a while. The kids are askin’. Them that can.’

  ‘This one?’

  ‘He cain’t ask. Not even Malik be reachin’ him.’

  ‘He can’t talk?’

  ‘All he can do, Doc, is swing. Goin’ on a year. He eats and sleeps some, but it’s all makin’ a deal so he can do this.’

  ‘This is all?’

  ‘There it is, Doc.’

  ‘It’s sad.’

  ‘It’s the worst thing in God’s world. There are fi’ty others, as worse as him. Leastwise what they call God’s world, you know what I mean?’

  ‘I used to. Goodbye.’

  A butterfly needle, IV tubing, and a small bottle of normal saline had been easy to steal from the dog lab. I had hoarded plenty of phenobarb. For several nights in a row I had stayed alone at home drinking and playing a kind of horrific game, assembling the pieces of a successful suicide. A few nights before I had tied a necktie around my biceps, pumped my fist, and watched the vein swell up out of the antecubital fossa like a lavender pill buried just under the skin. Then I had untied the tie and put it back with the others in my closet. One night I had played with the little butterfly needle, grasping the two cute wings between thumb and index finger and bending them back over the spine of the needle till they touched, readying the point to puncture the vein. Another night I’d laid it all out like a child’s jigsaw, the kind where an exquisitely cuddly cat is sawed up into only four or five pieces: the bottle of normal saline, the pills, the tubing, the needle. I’d unplugged the phone from the wall jack and stared at it, sipping George Dickel. So tonight was just another dalliance with the possibility, a variation on the theme. I knew, from all the suicides I’d seen this year in Misery – which, Lloyal von Nott had informed us all in a recent memo, were ‘in fact slightly below the mean for a fiscal year’ – that playing with the lethal made it easier, just as practicing anything makes it easier, but that kind of rational thought had lost meaning, lately, for me.

  Now, as if percussing a diseased chest, I tapped the wall behind my bed, sounding the stud. I hammered a nail into the wall above the bed, slipped the wire hanger from the IV bottle over the nail, ran the tubing down, and attached the butterfly. I dissolved the tablets of phenobarb in some saline, drew it up in a syringe, and injected it into the hanging bottle. The necktie lay beside me. I sat on the bed, trying to cut through my haze to remember.

  One of the stars of my Rhodes class at Oxford, a gifted writer and quarterback whose perfect spirals hurt your hands when they hit, a terrific guy whom everybody wanted to be with, a young man who would dare anything and who had by the age of thirty published two acclaimed novels, the last, Balliol Missed, set in our years in Oxford, a man all aglitter with success, had recently filled an IV bottle with drugs and put the line into himself and lay down and opened the cock and floated out to death. Went to sleep. Now I knew something of that sleep. Nice. Dreamless. Barbs kill REM-sleep. I hadn’t dreamed in weeks. Seamless. Ike too had gone out seamless, on barbiturates. Zoe’s suicide note said, ‘A smile plastered on my face dying inside.’ Now I understood. I was living a secret life. Plastering a shrink’s sureness on my face, underneath doubting everything. Eating drugs to deny what I was seeing. A secret, double life. Not sharing my pain with anyone for fear of reprisal. Not sharing how I, like Cherokee, awoke every morning feeling OK for fifteen seconds until something hit that he called ‘Dreadlock!’ and a little voice whispered, ‘How the hell am I gonna make it through the day?’ Pop my wake-up Ritalin. Hoist my body to the vertical. A walking illusion. Over my year in psychiatry, instead of living a life more truly, I’d come to live it more falsely.

  Now I sipped from my George Dickel, feeling bone tired, longing for sleep, even that curious sleep of death. I felt totally alone. No-one was fit to be with me, and I was fit to be with no-one.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I’m a doctor.’

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘There it is. God’s world.’

  ‘Why do some people kill themselves and others don’t?’

  Because of this, little boy, this big disconnect. Because of this yearning to ask for help and this loathing of the yearning. Feeling trapped, not wanting to be here but with all the usual refuges gone, even in the self, so that a retreat into the self feels like falling off the edge of the world. Not because of feeling, but of not feeling. Because ‘because’ becomes bullshit. The Big Disconnect. Should I tie that necktie around this arm?

  ‘Soul-death,’ Malik said, ‘their souls die first.’

  Now I understood. I felt, as if it were just last night, Ike’s last boneless handshake, saw his averted eyes. Something had been missing—

  ‘Dr Basch?’

  A voice in the living room, 12:34 a.m. A feather of hope, then fear.

  ‘Be right there.’

  I hid the bottle and tubing and needle and walked out into the living room.

  It was Zoe. Her tall slender frame was bulked up by a heavy sweater, and her light brown hair, even though cropped short, was disheveled. Her face was as pale as that ghostly heron I’d seen in the swamp.

  ‘Zoe?’ I said, flashing on, of all things, Heiler’s They’ll even show up at your home.

  She bent her head. ‘Sorry. But if I stayed alone in my apartment one more minute, I’d’ve killed myself.’ She bit her lip. ‘Dr Basch, I need help.’

  ‘Sit down.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  My heart beat fast – whrrr-thunk. I felt wide awake, alert.

  ‘That moment, when you saw me—’ She stopped, and I thought she would cry. But then I saw that her shame and grief had gone way past crying. As had my own. Suicide is way past crying. She looked down into her lap. ‘That was the worst moment of my life. Worse than when I tried to kill myself. Dr Basch, I am so ashamed.’

  She looked up, and our eyes met. Our vision coalesced around the vision of our eyes meeting when Schlomo was humping away, and then around a vision of shared shame, of both of us having hurt the other. I held her gaze. We were together in sorrow.

  She sighed. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘For?’

  ‘I don’t know – I guess I feel like I’m really seeing you, and I feel really seen by you, that’s all.’

  ‘Yes. Me too.’ I felt a flicker of excitement. We were seeing together. Was that what Ike White – and A.K. and the drug rats too – were afraid of? Being seen? Being seen as inadequate?

  ‘Your face right now,’ Zoe went on, ‘is like that first time I saw you, that night I came into the hospital – so open! And now … you’re hurting too, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I am.’

  ‘That bastard! How could it happen? He’s so pathetic!’

  ‘How did it?’

  ‘Partly, I guess, because he was so pathetic. Said his marriage to Dixie was miserable, celibate. That whole like tragic thing about his child drowning in his pool. I thought I could help him, maybe even save him – that’s how crazy it got. I always choose the jerks, the abusive guys, right from high school I went out with the assholes, seeing the good in them, hoping … trying, I guess, to save them.’ She sighed, fidgeted. ‘And he was powerful. Pathetic and powerful both. I felt special to him. He was the best around, and that first session, after I left Thoreau AMA and went to him for a consultation, and he said that even though he almost never did it he wouldn’t refer me to someone else but he would keep me for therapy himself?’ Her eyes widened. ‘Do you know what that meant,
to me, to someone who had no self-esteem left? I was honored. Talk about feeling like special. So special, I floated out of there like on a magic carpet.’ She shook her head, as if to clear her thoughts. ‘He seemed so into me! Put his hand on my shoulder as I left the office, patting my shoulder like a … like my father did, a few times. “Tell Schlomo,” he’d say. “Tell Schlomo Dove about sad and lonely.” And then, in the session, he’d pat my knee, and then he’d hold me. One thing led to another, like he hypnotized me with love or something, with those weird, slitty eyes, you know?’ I nodded. ‘And he said he’d never done this before with a patient, that I was the only one.’

  ‘You believe that?’

  ‘I felt it. But now …’ Her eyes narrowed to fury. ‘He’s scum! I hate him! He wouldn’t even buy condoms himself – told me to buy them, “You buy the condoms, to learn to take responsibility.” He kept them in a Ziploc bag under the head of the couch. And … I mean, bananas? His fetish with bananas? I feel so … dirty.’

  ‘When you went to see him, you were incredibly vulnerable, and—’

  ‘Yeah, but I’m a big girl, I knew what I was doing. I did it.’ She sighed. ‘Can I …’ She paused. ‘This is really hard to ask …’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Can I come back? See you again in therapy? I think maybe now, after all this, you could help me. Don’t you think?’

  ‘Yes, I think so. Sure.’

  She let her breath out in a whoosh, as if she hadn’t been breathing for a while. I too breathed out fully, unclenching a breath from around my ribs.

  ‘Thank God. I was sure you wouldn’t.’ She fell silent. Neither of us knew what to say. Finally she went on, ‘I … I’m afraid to be alone tonight. But it feels weird to be here too. Can we just keep talking a little longer?’

  ‘Sure. Maybe we can do something about him.’

  ‘Who would believe me?’

  ‘We would file a complaint together.’

  ‘Who’d believe us? I could never go through it in public, no way. Maybe he just lost it this once, with me, right?’ I thought about telling her that she wasn’t the only one, but it seemed, just then, too brutal.

  We sat. For a rare few moments in the suburbs, things were still.

  ‘Amazing,’ she said. ‘When I was a girl, my aunt Bev always said that this kind of stillness, at this time of night, means that there are angels passing overhead.’ She smiled, shyly, and I smiled too. ‘I’m OK. I’ll leave now, OK?’

  ‘I’ll walk you out.’

  My first call the next morning was to the information operator in the 701 area code, North Dakota. I got the number for Ideal Cleaners in Mandan, and dialed it. A woman with an accent I’d never heard before answered. I could barely hear her over the intermittent hisses of what sounded like big steam presses going full blast.

  ‘Solini!’ I shouted. ‘I’m looking for Henry Solini!’

  ‘One minute,’ she shouted, and then shouted even louder out into the cleaning establishment, ‘Hey, Little Hawk! LITTLE HAWK!’ The phone went clunk, and I waited for Henry ‘Little Hawk’ Solini. The phone was picked up.

  ‘Yeah?’ a voice shouted.

  ‘Solini?’

  ‘Yeah? Who’s this?’

  ‘Roy.’

  ‘Roy?’ he shouted, astonished.

  ‘Little Hawk?’ I shouted back.

  ‘That’s my Sioux name, out here. You know how it is. How the hell are you?’

  ‘Bad.’

  ‘Sorry to hear that, man.’

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘Cool. Everything’s cool. Lemme get on the cellular phone and go out back in the alley so we can have some privacy.’

  We talked for a long time, about everything. I asked him what had happened after I’d dropped him off at his analyst Ed Slapadek, the last time I’d seen him.

  ‘I was in rough shape, man, with Hannah tryin’ to kill herself and the Slapper telling me I was gay-latent. I flipped out on Toshiba and I went to Ed needing some help. But he just kept confronting me about how I felt about him. So I tell him he reminds me of my father. He goes, “Let’s work on the father-transference,” and I go, “No, you really are like him, short and authoritarian and bigoted.” So he calls me “gay-latent.” That did it. I go, “This is ridiculous!” He goes, “What comes to mind about ‘ridiculous’?” I say, “What comes to mind is ‘Fuck you, Ed!’” I get up and veer off into the kitchen and go out the back door and run into the woods. I had my wallet – he demanded a hundred twenty dollars cash at the start of each session – and I used my Visa to get back to Mandan, back to Ideal Cleaners. And y’know what I found out, right back here in Ideal Cleaners?’

  I said I did not know what he’d found out back in Ideal Cleaners.

  ‘That there’s nothin’ wrong with me! Or my old man! Or Ideal Cleaners! Nothin’! We’re all cool! It’s rough, man, when you shine the high beams of analysis on reality. Everything looks different, and a lot worse than it really is.’

  ‘Good for you, Henry Solini!’

  ‘Roy-babe, I am gonna make my move!’

  ‘Awright! And what’s your move?’

  A pause. ‘Dunno yet. The market for white reggae singers in the Dakotas is a little slow this time of year. I’m a little bored here already. What’s up with you, babe?’

  I told him what I’d been going through, about Schlomo and Zoe and Lily, and said I really needed his help and maybe he could come back to Misery, at least till the end of the year, and help me figure out what to do.

  ‘Cool, Roy,’ he said without hesitation. ‘Von Nott put me on a leave of absence, so I can still come back, yeah. Yeah,’ he said, considering, ‘maybe before I quit shrinking, it’d be cool to stick it to those assholes. Yeah. OK. I got a few things to clean up out here, with Everett and my ex and a motorcycle, you know how it is, but I’ll be there, babe, maybe like next week.’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘Yeah, see if you can find my car, OK?’

  ‘It’s still where you left it, in the parking lot up in the Heidelbergs, but the tires are gone. I’ll get it fixed up for you.’

  ‘Cool. One thing, though. I’ll call Hannah, in Wyoming. She needs to get some damn closure on this Misery-shit too.’

  ‘Cool,’ I said. ‘Love you, Little Hawk.’

  ‘There it is. Hang loose.’

  I tried again that same morning to talk with Lily Putnam, but she was still too out of it, lying there with those same stuffed-animal eyes as all the others on the West, stuffed not like a child’s fuzzy toy but like a taxidermist’s dream. I realized that somehow I had to get her completely off drugs.

  I searched out Mr K. One night on call I brought him to the West. He showed Lily how to tongue her pills. She watched him, mute and confused, but maybe she understood.

  Two days later on the hall, the Man Who Thought He Was a Kernel of Corn came up to me. He looked less weirded out. To my surprise, he actually talked.

  ‘Just one more test and I’m going to be discharged,’ he said. ‘Dr Cynthia Krabkin says I’m ready to go back to my chicken farm in Bangor.’

  ‘Congratulations. There must be a lot of pleasure in farming.’

  ‘I know now,’ he said, firmly, ‘that I am not a kernel of corn.’

  ‘Good luck.’ Lily Putnam, with a lifeless trudge and blank stare, came up and slipped me a note:

  This is fake. I’m better. Meet me in my room tonight.

  That night, without drugs, she was pretty much back to her usual self, alert, bright-eyed, appropriately sad. And angry. ‘Get me out of here!’

  ‘Are you suicidal?’

  ‘No. I’ve never been suicidal. I’ve got my children to think of. That maniac Dr Cabot showed up at my house with a pink paper and a syringe full of hell and I’ve been in la-la-land ever since. I’m worried to death about my children. Can you get me out?’

  ‘Let’s go.’

  ‘Now? Right now?’

  ‘I’ll sign the discharge order myself.’


  ‘Oh.’ She hesitated. ‘I … Is it quite OK, I mean to do this?’

  ‘I’m with you. Get your things. Walk like you’re drugged up, to the door.’

  ‘But how will I get home?’

  ‘I’ll drive you.’

  I went to the chart rack, worried that someone would notice. The night staff were relaxing with glossy magazines in the stressless chairs behind the glass booth, eating and drinking and reading. Nonchalantly I wrote the discharge order and closed the chart. It would be a while before it was read.

  As I came back to the Dutch doors, Lily was walking past, faking a drug-trudge toward the door. I went out onto the ward, as if going to talk to her. I talked. She, shuffling her feet, pretended to take no notice. As we neared the door, Deedee the nurse glanced up. Our eyes met. I froze.

  But even from across the room and through the glass, her eyes showed a glaze – from whatever drug she was eating. I rolled my own eyes as if in frustrated resignation at trying to actually talk to one of these ‘psychiatric theme parks.’ She smiled, and walked away. My key slid smoothly into the worn lock. I led Lily out.

  We drove silently through the crystalline starry night along a loud spring river and up into a declivity of the mountains and then down again to a valley and to the horse farm poor Cherokee had bought with his severance pay from Walt Disney. I felt Lily’s fragility, and was reluctant to speak. She too was silent. The farmhouse was dark. Her parents, who had been taking care of the children, must have been asleep, as were the children. I went with her into each child’s room, and heard her crying softly at the sight of these two damaged angels, sweetly asleep.

  ‘I can never thank you enough,’ she said, saying goodbye at the door.

  ‘There’s one thing more. At some point I need to ask you what the truth is about Schlomo Dove.’

  Fear slithered across her eyes. She looked down at her feet. ‘We’ve been having sex since last summer. Come back tomorrow. We’ll talk.’

  In that horrific basement of the Farben the next morning, May 15 and my last day on the West, I found myself walking past the stench and pitiful whining of the dogs, which reminded me how worried I was about Thorny, wherever he was out there. I walked into Win Winthrop’s office. Win sat at his desk playing with his keyboard. Van Dusky the husky, recovering from his brain surgery, was lying at his feet whimpering and licking his hock without cessation, without, one might say, ‘missing a lick.’ A note written in red Magic Marker was posted over the computer: