Mount Misery

by Samuel Shem

  Arch. Gen. Psych. Wants Our Dog Study For Their Lead Article!

  ‘Archives of Genetic Psychiatry?’ I asked.

  ‘Not Genetic, General. Published by the AMA: “Physicians dedicated to the health of America.” They want our dog study for their lead article.’

  ‘Van Dusky?’ I called out. The husky wagged his tail and got up, sort of, for only two of his four legs now worked. He tried to hop toward me on the good two, the bad two sticking out spastically. With a whimper Van Dusky fell on his face. He began licking his hock with his tongue.

  ‘I just want to tell you, Win, that you’d’ve made a great Nazi.’

  ‘Yeah and you got no balls. Hey – stop that!’

  I was ripping the tape spools off the two cartoon clown’s eyes on the mainframe computer and stomping them into Van Dusky’s wet dog chow. As Win bent to save them I kicked as many manuscript pages as I could all over the place and stomped those into the dog food too and then bent down and picked up Van Dusky and carried him out.

  ‘You’re psychotic!’

  ‘Tell it to the ASPCA.’

  He chose to save his manuscripts rather than his dog. The dog was heavy, but I struggled upstairs to Telecommunications and shut the bulletproof behind me. Laying Van Dusky gently down, I told Viv what was up and she dialed the ASPCA hot line. I told them that it was an emergency with an abused dog in need of shelter and that the Misery dog lab was a torture chamber, right out of the Dark Ages.

  While we waited, I talked with Viv about the atrocities I’d seen among the drug fascists on the West, and about how depressed I’d been. Soon the ASPCA men in their white coats were screaming at Errol and Win in their white coats. Mr Beef Telly, head of Security, was shouting into his walkie-talkie for help.

  As we watched this tragicomic pantomime on the far side of the bulletproof, I said to Viv:

  ‘Those guys almost killed me.’

  ‘Yeah. If you was drowning, those jokers would throw you a rock.’

  When I went to pick up my things on the West, I passed the Quiet Room and saw the Man Who Thought He Was a Kernel of Corn, plastered up against the wall, terrified. He was staring at a real live chicken that was walking around clucking and scratching and pecking.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked him through the slit for speaking. ‘I thought you knew that you’re not a kernel of corn.’

  ‘I know I’m not a kernel of corn,’ the man said, eyes riveted on the chicken, ‘but how do I know that that chicken knows?’

  A nurse arrived, to scatter a few drugs.

  How had this happened? How had the received wisdom gotten so far from the human heart?

  HEIDELBERG EAST

  ‘Identify, don’t compare.’

  —ANONYMOUS

  Eighteen

  ‘YES, HE SEEMED repulsive to me too, at first,’ Lily Putnam was saying later that night, lighting another cigarette.

  We were in Cherokee’s study, up over the horses in the barn. Dusk had turned to dark, and the roof, all skylights, showed the first stars faceting the night. The horses below were snorting and stamping, as if impatient for the man to reappear. We were sipping tea. She had offered drinks. I wanted a nice sharp bourbon, but I felt that in this middle ground between life and therapy I should abstain. I was trying to detox my way out of the beauty parlor of drugs I’d wandered into on Heidelberg West.

  ‘I was ripe,’ she went on, ‘for someone to take a real interest in me. The years in California, away from both our families, in such a bizarre, hedonistic, rather fake place, had taken its toll. It was Fantasyland, really. Not only on Cherokee, on me too. Back here, poor Cher started to feel like such a failure. He withdrew from me. And from the girls. Even though he put in a lot of time with them, he wasn’t really there for them either. I tried to get him to get some help, but he wouldn’t. It went against his grain. I don’t know how you did it, I mean get him to come to see you, it was marvelous, really. And so I was getting more and more isolated, more desperate, doubting myself, my attractiveness as a woman, doubting everything. I felt I needed help, though it went against my grain as well. Well, one day a friend told me about Schlomo, who could sort of match you up with the right therapist. That first appointment, he said, “You’re like the sun, emanating warmth, giving it away to others, leaving yourself cold and empty.” And then he said that although he didn’t often do it, he would keep me for his own patient. I was thrilled.’ She sighed, and went on, ‘I believed him. Over time, I began to have strong feelings for him. I could see the person living in that repulsive, rather forlorn body. A powerful person. Those strange eyes, you know?’ I nodded. ‘It started innocently enough. He’d touch me as I was leaving the office, first on the shoulder, a friendly pat, then my lower back … and so forth. Then he’d touch me when I was in the office, and then, well, when I was on the couch. And he isolated me from Cher and my family. Told me that analysis only works if you keep it secret. He was especially strict about my not telling my husband. One thing led to another. New underwear. Perfume. He had this thing about hair. I prided myself on my long light brown hair, but he said he liked it short, boyish. One day I cut it all off. For him? God damn!’ She blew a plume of smoke, and looked around Cherokee’s office as if for the first time, taking it in.

  ‘I feel so guilty,’ she went on, ‘but it seems so strange now, to think that I would go in there at six in the morning, he would nod, we would undress, have sex, and then we’d smoke a cigarette together and talk, as if it were the most normal thing in the world, a kind of “Hi, how are you? OK, you? OK.” I started smoking again, after having a bitch of a time quitting. And then, as time went on, we’d talk less and less about me, and more and more about him. Telling you about it now, it all seems like a bad dream. How could it have happened? At first I felt so ashamed. He analyzed it out. “It’s your WASP upbringing,” he said. “People aren’t naturally monogamous. This analysis will free you up. Affairs are good, a good good thing, as long as you don’t tell the one you’re cheating on. Get in touch with your grief, your tsouris.” I started to feel sorry for him. He told me about his little boy drowning in his pool. He complained about his miserable marriage – no sex with Dixie – about his heart condition – he was on diuretics, and kept bananas around, for potassium. Sometimes … we’d even use the bananas … It got so I felt I was his therapist, imagine?’ I nodded. Again she sighed. ‘Now, it seems like he had me in a trance, as if he somehow, without my knowing it, hypnotized me. When I would say I was ashamed he would analyze it as my “tight-ass WASP hang-up, a transference to your father. Tell Schlomo.” I would cry, and he would listen. Seemed to listen, anyway.’

  ‘And after Cherokee died?’

  Pain came to her eyes. ‘I … I said to Schlomo that I wanted to stop. But he … more or less forced me … He really got into it.’

  ‘And then you said you were going to report him?’ She nodded. ‘I don’t know if I meant it, really. But that same day I got a call from your patient Christine telling me about Cherokee and her, and about how obsessed he had become, with Schlomo and me. That hit me hard. In a way, it motivated me to try to get clearer. I was sitting at the kitchen table, writing out a list of what to do about all this, and the next thing I knew that madman Dr Cabot was there banging around the place shouting at me and waving a pink paper, and then I refused to leave and he injected me with something and I didn’t really wake up until you got that sweet old man to teach me how to tongue the pills and you led me out.’ Her hand ruffled her short, light brown hair. ‘Thanks so much.’

  We sat in silence, together. Occasionally she would glance up at me, and I would hold her eyes for a second, and glance away. It was hard to face her. Not so much for her shame, as for mine. The horses snorted and stomped.

  ‘Schlomo said that he had never done this before, with a patient, that I was the only one. He said that I was special to him.’

  I thought of A.K., making me feel special, to her. ‘I understand, Lily, how good that feels. Bu
t I have something to tell you.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You were not the only one.’

  She stared at me. ‘I … I don’t believe that.’

  ‘I’m sure of it. There’s one other woman he was abusing. At least one.’

  ‘I refuse to believe that.’

  ‘The things he told you – “the warmth of the sun” line, the “keeping what you say and do in therapy secret” – I’ve heard the same things from her.’

  ‘What else? That I haven’t already told you?’

  ‘That he made you buy the condoms? “To learn to take responsibility.” That he kept the condoms in a Ziploc bag hidden in the head of the couch?’ Her jaw dropped. ‘Would you meet with the other victim? To see about taking action against him? I’ll be there with you, or, if you would prefer, not?’

  ‘No, I couldn’t do that … I’ve had enough. As have the children. I’m quite exhausted. Barely hanging on, as is. I just want to pretend it never happened.’

  ‘Will you think about it?’

  ‘Yes. No. No, I want it to go away, to not be.’

  ‘That’s the mistake we both made, with Cherokee.’

  She got up and walked around her dead husband’s office. Her body seemed slight and frail. Night birds chirped outside. The sophisticated horses kicked and whinnied under our feet, the aloof soft sounds a comfort. The silence was that expectant, big silence of night in woods on mountains.

  ‘There are no pictures of me here in Cher’s office,’ she said. ‘One day I noticed that, that he’d torn up every picture of me, even pictures which contained me, in his office. I never said anything to him about that.’ She stared at a picture of Cherokee in midair on a horse sailing over a fence. ‘Schlomo was my fault. I did it, of my own free will.’

  ‘No way.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Schlomo raped you.’

  ‘That last time, but not at the start. I wanted him to … to “fuck” me.’

  ‘His words, right? “Deep down you want Poppa Schlomo to fuck you”?’

  She blushed, and nodded. ‘But I felt chosen. It got so I couldn’t wait for morning – I’d dress up, put on perfume – don’t you see? – I liked it.’

  ‘Yes, I do see. But being a therapist, I know how much power we have, how easy it would be. Will you think about meeting the other woman?’

  ‘I can’t very well not think about it now, can I? But I have to think of the children too. How could I put them through that? No.’

  I got up to go. ‘You OK, though? No suicidal thoughts?’

  ‘No. I’m not one of those who walk out on their lives. Good night.’

  ‘You’ve had a difficult time here this year, haven’t you?’

  This question was asked me by Malik’s friend, Dr Geneva Hooevens, the blind woman analyst who had spoken up at the meeting to ask about Ike White’s killing himself. Now, her question surprised me. It was the first time it had ever been asked me that whole year, with the exception of Malik, who seemed always to be asking me, one way or another. Malik. Where was he? Bronia, back from Israel, had called me, asking if I knew where he was. Worrisome.

  Geneva Hooevens was temporarily in charge of Heidelberg East, the Alcohol and Drug Recovery Unit, where I would spend the rest of my first year. We were sitting in her office off the nursing station, which, Geneva told me, had once been the kitchen of the stone mansion built in 1812 as the home for the ‘Keeper’ of the lunatics of the Mount Misery Asylum. Remnants could still be seen: labeled bells for ringing the servants, gaslight fittings. The large living room now served as a common room for the drunks and addicts who were the ‘clients.’

  I felt awkward with Geneva. I had not spent much time with blind people, and seeing her while unseen by her, I felt I had to be more aware of my movements, my sounds, even my glances, for I sensed myself being attuned to more acutely by her other senses. My doctor’s eyes told me that this was not a blindness from birth, but one more recent and gradual: her skin, the truth-teller, was mottled and scarred from recurrent infection, the nails pale, suggesting a circulatory failure of the small vessels, most likely severe diabetes. She wore glasses tinted that same amber as Malik’s, and her seeing-eye dog Yoman and her cane seemed naturally part of her. I found myself staring into Yoman’s alert, patient eyes, as if they were hers, thinking, Thank God, Win and Errol never got this one. The cane leaned on her chair akimbo, as if needing a cane itself.

  ‘Yes,’ I answered, ‘it’s been a nightmare.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ she said, with what sounded like genuine concern, although I had so often heard similar ‘genuine concern’ from the shrinks at Misery – ‘genuine concern’ that turned out to be the opposite, either ‘phony’ concern or ‘genuine’ attack – that despite myself I was suspicious. ‘What happened?’

  ‘I went into psychiatry to learn how to be with people in a real, human way. I thought psychiatrists did that. But what I’ve seen here is the most inhumane treatment of people ever. It’s worse than medicine. My father was a dentist and I’d always feared becoming a dentist. This may even be worse than dentistry.’

  ‘Yes, I know. Much of what I’ve seen here is perverse. Most large institutions evolve to perversity, to power-over systems, where someone always has power over you, and you have power over someone else. But here we do things differently. It’s a whole new model of disease and recovery.’

  ‘How’s it different?’

  ‘Ever been to an AA meeting?’

  ‘No. I don’t know much about self-help programs.’

  ‘AA’s more a “mutual”-help program, in fact. A power-with program. The best way to learn is to spend time on the unit, working with the staff – most of them are recovering alcoholics and addicts. They have to be at least two years sober.’

  ‘And they’ll tell me?’

  ‘Show you. One tells a person some bits of knowledge; one shows a person something that leads to understanding. Remember organic chemistry, the premed course?’ I nodded, realized she couldn’t see me nod, but she seemed to sense it, and went on, ‘Do you remember much of your organic chemistry?’

  I drew a blank, seeing vaguely a toy model of a carbon ring that could flip two ways like an umbrella in the wind, the two forms named … blank and blank. I had busted my ass to make an A in organic because they said if you made an A in organic at the Best College you were sure of admission to the Best Medical School. How crucial it had seemed, how hard I’d worked, and how worthless organic had proved in medicine. What a waste of that dazzling young energy, to memorize all that crap. And would all this training prove a waste too, looking back? ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I don’t remember a thing.’

  ‘Nor do I, of mine. A waste. You forget knowledge. You never forget what you understand.’ She smiled, a Stevie Wonder smile directed up and out beyond us, yet to ourselves. ‘I’m a recovering alcoholic, eight years sober. My blindness came on gradually, from diabetes, exacerbated by my drinking.’

  ‘And you drank because?’

  ‘Because I’m a drunk.’ She clasped her hands in her lap, over a bright red sash with tiny bells. Berry always said that if you look hard, you can see, in anyone, a touch of the Divinity. Berry! My heart twisted on its spindle, in pain. Geneva sat quietly for a few seconds. Then, in a firm, soft voice, as if she were placing each word like a seed in a row, right spacing, right depth, she went on, ‘Perhaps it would have been better if I had not gone blind. And yet, at some point, through my blindness I saw that seeking the easy and comfortable way was no longer my path. I’ve come to understand that one way to live is to run hard shouting against some fact of your life, and that another way is to surrender to the life force, to opening up, to learning the value of the situation in which you find yourself. The ego is insatiable, and will fight tooth and nail against surrender, against its own limits. Which is what makes surrender so valuable. Remarkable, is it not?’

  ‘I … I guess I’m all out of “remarkable” for today.’

 
; ‘Good for you!’ she cried excitedly, clapping her hands like a child.

  ‘Good?’

  ‘Perhaps you’re ready for something new!’ She stroked Yoman, who responded with that happy ‘Hooray’ whimper that dog owners love. ‘Feel free, here, to do as much or as little as you wish. I shall be most curious, given how you’ve been treated this year, to hear what you see.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, getting up, not knowing whether to shake her hand.

  ‘Thank you!’ she said enthusiastically, holding out her hand. I extended mine. She clasped it solidly, as if our hands were all of us, yet so much beyond us as to be small, almost comic or incidental parts of everything larger.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For hearing me into speech. Goodbye.’ I said goodbye and walked to the door, but just as I opened it she said, ‘One more thing?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Have fun!’

  ‘Fun in Misery would be radical.’

  ‘Wonderful word, “radical,” is it not?’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said gloomily, not wanting to go along with all this hope. ‘Look – I’m really suspicious of religion, OK?’

  ‘AA isn’t religious, it’s spiritual.’

  ‘What’s the difference?’

  ‘Authority.’ She pointed to the wall, where a framed photo hung. ‘See that photo?’ A mob of Indians in turbans were being mowed down by rifle fire from a line of British troops in pith helmets. The commander of the British troops stood at attention, arms crossed over his chest, his face curious, as if he were judging a race.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘The soldiers, firing, take no responsibility, for they are just following orders. The officer, having given the order, takes no responsibility for the actual killing. In a power-over system, violence is the inevitable result. But listen to me,’ she chided herself, ‘I’m telling you what I just told you no-one can tell you. Good luck.’