by Samuel Shem
Jill said she had ‘gone up.’ In the Galápagos, a red translucent ball had rolled along the grass at her. ‘Suddenly I was going faster than light all reddish up to a big silver spaceship.’ The aliens looked just like the pictures in the tabloids at supermarket checkout counters, less scary than friendly, ‘like small gooey puppies.’ Then somehow she’d hitchhiked from the Galápagos to Puerto Rico, where she visited an astronomer who worked at the radio telescope that was trying to receive messages from other life in the universe.
‘Sorry if I’m not making sense,’ she said. ‘My brain isn’t working that well. I’m waiting for my period and I feel like a blimp. So what about you?’
‘I’ve been on an emotional roller coaster.’
‘Good!’
‘Good?’
‘For some people that might be a problem, but not for you. So?’
I told her everything. When I finished, she said, ‘You were gonna kill yourself over this? Are you crazy?’
‘I guess I was.’
‘I’m glad you didn’t because it would not have been very smart. Funny. I never picked up any “killing yourself” signal from you. Fifteen minutes with a woman waiting in line to use a ladies’ room and you know more about her than fifteen years with a guy. I feel sorry for guys actually.’ She took my arm, my triceps against her breast. ‘But I can’t get over it – you’re so …’
‘What?’
‘I dunno, you’re just so in it with me, now. Now, we could really get it on!’ Her hand brushed my thigh. ‘But we can’t, so keep talking.’
I told her about Schlomo.
‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘I know.’
‘You know?’
‘A lot of us who worked here know. He’s been doin’ it for years. Women go to him to find a therapist. The ones he wants to fuck, he keeps for himself, and the others he sends to somebody else. I went to him. He said he’d be my therapist, and I looked him up and down and said, “Is this a joke?”’
‘Why hasn’t anyone tried to stop him?’ She laughed. ‘What’s so funny?’
‘You. Look, you grew up thinking you had some clout, right? You were the privileged class. Me, and my people, we are the unprivileged class. We assume that these guys, the ones running things, are crooked, and perverts. A lot of us mental health workers knew about Schlomo. Patients would tell us, sometimes, and at first we’d tell our bosses – Heiler, Errol, A.K. They’d tell us that the patients were crazy. Where I come from, you go along to get along, or else. Forget it. You can’t do nothin’ about it.’
‘You’ll see.’
‘You’re actually going to try?’
‘You bet. Will you help us, give us names of other victims?’
‘No way. I’ve seen what they can do to you if you mess with them.’
We found ourselves in a clearing, staring at a trailer park. The house trailers were parked in neat rows, each with its propane tanks and those aluminum awnings you see on TV wrapped around palm trees when hurricanes hit Florida. A trailer park, in Misery? A fresh sign, in the Misery colors and with the Misery pine tree and moon and duck rampant, read:
MOUNT MISERY AFFILIATED PSYCHIATRISTS
Underneath was a map, with a ‘You are here’ cross and the paths to each of nine house trailers, with a list of names, including:
GENEVA HOOEVENS, M.D. MODULAR UNIT 7
‘Mind if I look her up?’
‘No. I know her. She’s great.’
Yoman the seeing-eye dog lay on the steps of Modular 7 beneath a hand-lettered sign:
HERE AT MISERY
THE FLOGGING WILL CONTINUE
UNTIL MORALE IMPROVES.
I knocked. Geneva answered. I introduced Jill, whom she remembered.
‘What’s with the trailer park?’ I asked.
‘Misery’s in money trouble. There’s been a sudden drop in the census. Lloyal and Nash are trying to get rid of me and the other psychiatrists who still believe in talking with patients. It’s all drugs now. In a few days they’ll close up Heidelberg East for good.’
‘What? Why?’
‘Empty beds. Insurance was only paying for a few days of detox. They’ll close the building, add another DSM diagnosis to each patient, and send them all over to a new “Dual Diagnosis Unit,” run by Errol Cabot. Errol’s going to be putting all the drug addicts and alcoholics on drugs.’
‘Great. And what’s with these house trailers?’
‘These house trailers are not “house trailers.” They are “temporary Misery-quality modular office structures.’”
We laughed. I told her about Schlomo, and asked if she’d ever heard of him abusing other patients.
‘Yes.’ She thought for a moment. ‘Could it be twenty years ago already? Yes. I still had my sight. I got a call from an internist who said a young woman patient of his had come to him claiming to have been sexually abused in therapy by Schlomo and would I see her. I met with the woman, and believed her. I was a member of the Freudian Institute. Assured of confidentiality, I filed a complaint. Schlomo was a rising star then. The institute said that unless the woman came forward and made a public complaint, they could do nothing. And she couldn’t do that. Too vulnerable.’
‘Did anything happen?’
‘Lots. Schlomo found out, and stopped referring patients to me. I was blacklisted. But it was good, in the end, to give up psychoanalysis. Forced me to learn new things. Like learning new ways to see.’
‘He’s been abusing patients for twenty years?’
‘At least twenty.’
‘Do you know any women who might talk?’ I asked.
She thought for a while, but could not come up with anyone. I felt even more discouraged. ‘But it’s such a rich afternoon!’ she said happily. ‘Shall we walk a little, on the path through the woods?’
We started out. Geneva had one of her hands on the dog’s harness and the other resting lightly on my arm, as if I were escorting a shy girlfriend to a dance. Having gone blind gradually, she’d been able to cultivate her other senses in synchrony with the decay of her eyes. This time of year, with all the plants and trees in bloom and the moisture of the air acting like a second blossoming, the scent was, as she said, ‘Heavenly, heavenly.’ We came to a clearing, a fork in the path where the daylight was made all the more dazzling by the wooded dark and the memory of rain. We stood in that moment’s mist and sun. Jill said she had to go.
‘See you soon,’ I said, putting my cheek to hers, my hand reflexively moving to the hillock of her belly, to the free edge of her marvelous breast.
‘No you won’t,’ she said, pressing my fingers to her, ‘I’m leaving tonight for the Amazon.’
‘The Amazon? Why?’
‘Life’s easy, if you’re on the beam!’
With a hug that took my breath away, her breasts pliant against my chest so that I saw them again naked, half tanned, and swaying, she was gone.
Geneva and I and Yoman walked on slowly, talking.
‘This training,’ I said, ‘this whole first year of training, has been unreal. I don’t know if I can take two more. How can you stay here?’
‘I shan’t stay much longer. People like me don’t stay long in places like this. The Lloyals and Nashes of the world stay, not I.’
‘It’s like everything I’ve been taught here,’ I said, ‘goes against anything I’ve learned to be true. If I’m sitting there with patients thinking, I can’t be with them. It’s like “I think, therefore I am not.’”
‘Quite. It’s not the method you use, but the person you are. Do you know, the older I get, the more it seems that what we’re quote “taught” is opposite to what really is. We’re taught to avoid conflict because it will lead to violence, when in fact it’s the very avoidance of conflict that will do so. We’re taught that the way to avoid stereotypes is to not look at difference, when in truth it’s only by seeing deeply into difference that stereotype is avoided. Even Freud’s idea that therapy is a process of making the unconscious consciou
s? Perhaps we’d all be better off helping people make the conscious unconscious – getting all of our egos out of the way!’
We laughed together. The dog looked up at us, seeming to smile, as dogs do.
‘Sounds like something Malik would say,’ I said.
Stillness. A bird cried, a blue jay. Malik.
Walking on in silence, we heard the thwap thwap of tennis balls being hit. Soon we were in view of the tennis court. There, in the cage of chain-link fencing, four people were playing doubles. Even from a distance the intensity of their game was evident. It was being played in hostile silence but for rare curses and complaints from one side of the net.
‘Who are they?’ Geneva asked.
‘Let’s see.’ I led her toward the court. We stopped under the skirts of the big copper beech. I’d fallen asleep here, before that first Ike seminar.
The four were Dr Blair Heiler, Dr Errol Cabot, Dr A. K. Lowell, and Dr Schlomo Dove. Heiler and Cabot were playing against Lowell and Dove. All wore classic white tennis gear except Schlomo, who was in Converse All-Stars and black socks unrolled below bulging varicose calves. Their rackets were the latest design and alloy, those oversized oval jobs with big sweet spots.
I led Geneva to courtside and stood watching. Each of the players glanced at us in turn, secreting away any reaction, denying we were there.
Heiler was aggressive, hogging the net, slashing away viciously at every shot, and, when he missed, shouting and cursing and throwing his racket in disgust.
Errol was pure macho, his thighs and calves and biceps full of steroids and God knows what other drugs, hogging the court, thundering bulkily between the baseline and the net, thrashing at the ball as if it were a feeling still left alive after ever-higher doses of medications, thrashing with grunts and curses and cries of disbelief at the weird spins and bounces it would take.
In the throat of the curses from Heiler and Cabot, the other side of the net functioned in an eerie silence.
A.K. was, as I knew all too well, a lobber. She lay back, in a defensive and defended position, never leaving the back-court and baseline, merely trudging to and fro, with plenty of time to gauge the ball coming at her, and, for each ball, even the most hot low drive, somehow with a flick of her wrist sending it up and up and up, lobbed over the heads of the onrushing foes, sending them scrambling back together and calling for it and trying to elbow each other out of the way to hit it, and then, either Errol or Heiler smashing at it as if it were a last hungry mosquito in the bedroom at night, usually failing to hit it at all, or hitting it and his partner or himself, and cursing out the ball or the partner or A.K. for playing ‘wimp’ tennis.
Most bizarre was Schlomo. In all my years as a tennis player, including my stint as captain of the Columbia High Fish Hawk tennis team, I had never come up against a player like Schlomo. He was a slicer. He never hit the ball true. He had perfected a stroke that could put a spin on the ball in many different ways, so that when it bounced, it never bounced the way Errol or Heiler thought it would. It kept you guessing. Sometimes lower than it seemed, sometimes higher, sometimes to the right, sometimes to the left. Just when they thought they had figured out, from Schlomo’s stroke motion, which way it would spin, he’d dupe them by somehow with the same motion hitting it dead straight.
And Schlomo cheated. Any close call, any ball hitting the line, he would call ‘Out!’ This would provoke argument from Errol and Heiler, but Schlomo would respond to these accusations with silence, and when A.K. was asked her opinion, she would respond vehemently with as much nothing as I’d ever heard.
Soon the Heiler-Cabots were infuriated. Curses doubled in intensity, rackets crashed to the blacktop. You’d think they all hated each other.
Geneva asked what was happening. I described it blow by blow. My talking during their tense awaiting of service annoyed them. Heiler and Cabot told me to ‘Be quiet.’ The other two sent me contemptuous glances.
Suddenly there were other people watching.
Solini and Hannah and the formidable Gilda were across the court from us, their fingers laced into the chain-link fence.
And then who should walk up and lean against the fence behind Heiler and Errol but Mr K. and the Lady Who Ate Metal Objects. They stood watching, lacing their fingers into the twisted squares of metal, the Metal Lady gnawing at the galvanized alloy with a vengeance.
A few minutes later, Zoe appeared and took up a position directly behind Schlomo Dove. When Schlomo turned and walked back to take his serve, he caught sight of her. He showed no reaction, but his first serve, a vicious slice, sailed long. His second, one of those inept ‘patty-cake’ pops, sailed far over the line, out of bounds. Double fault.
We watched the four shrinks on court flailing away in hatred and contempt. None of us said anything, but the pressure on them was almost palpable. It was only a matter of time before the game would be over. We would stay until it was.
They never even finished the set.
Schlomo walked to the net, gesturing the others to him. They consulted. Heiler and Cabot argued and cursed, to no effect. The four got their gear and walked toward the door of the cage. Suddenly there was a shout:
‘Dickheads Incorporate!’
Could it be? The person shouting this, strolling lazily down the path from the Farben, looked a little like Thorny, but rather than the wild-eyed, scraggly-clothed maniac who’d escaped from Misery many weeks ago, here was a clean-shaven, bright-eyed, calm young man in a dark business suit and snappy tie, carrying a briefcase and a laptop.
‘Dickheads with Laptops!’ he cried out happily.
‘Thorny?’ I asked, taking his hand as he joined Geneva and me.
‘Clean and serene!’ he answered. His handshake was as firm as an MBA’s.
‘Clean and serene?’
‘Thorny!’ He stared at the shrinks at the net. ‘Hey hey hey!’ he shouted at them. ‘We got us some Dickheads at Play!’
We laughed, and then we fell silent, watching them watching us.
Then they walked from the net to the gate, opened it, and filed out, one by one.
We stared at them. They couldn’t meet the pressure of our outrage. They looked away, saying nothing to each other. They walked the concrete path leading out of the amphitheater formed by the facades of Farben, Toshiba, the Toshiba research foot, and the high ledge of granite and thick woods. The four of them in single file disappeared over a hillock toward the safety of the parking lot and their wonderful cars. Even though we had failed to find another victim, even though it now seemed like the whole thing would just fizzle out and join the other buried violence of the year, I felt great.
The amphitheater was quiet, even still. Then, with a shout, the Metal Lady started running up the path after the shrinks.
‘They can’t stand it,’ I said to Geneva.
‘Stand what?’ she asked.
‘Feeling seen. They can’t stand feeling seen.’
‘Yes,’ she said, taking my arm to leave. ‘We can’t.’
Free that weekend, Berry and I did a day hike up the back face of Sunapee to Lake Solitude, picnicked and swam, and drove to Dartmouth for dinner. As we walked up to the Hanover Inn we saw black and white balloons everywhere, tugging up against their tethers in the brisk June breeze. The patio was filled with black people and white people celebrating something. One black and white couple were dancing. The white man wore a black tuxedo; the black woman a white wedding dress.
‘There’s hope,’ Berry said.
‘Wonderful, yes.’
We walked into the lobby. As we approached the counter I saw a short, bald, chubby Jewish-looking man in his fifties, wearing a dark suit, his arm around a much younger woman, who was quite a bit taller than he. She was slender, with an aristocratic face and sharp nose. Her hair was cut short. She wore a light-colored summer dress. Guests at the wedding. As if caught in a black-and-white photo, they stood still, watching the bride and groom cruise the floor.
A chill shot th
rough me. I squeezed Berry’s hand.
‘What’s wrong?’ she asked. ‘Do you know them?’
‘No.’
‘What, then?’
‘We’ve got it. I think I’ve found another victim.’
‘Who?’
‘A. K. Lowell.’
‘What?’
‘C’mon. We’ve got to drive back down to my house, before it’s too late!’
‘But what about dinner?’
‘No way. No time. I’ll explain as we go. Jesus! C’mon!’
I dragged her, half running, to her Volvo. I drove back up alongside the College Green, beat the yellow light across Main Street and roared down the hill and across the river to the interstate. When we were settled into mindless speed, I told her.
The sudden sight of the two people standing there had made my mind flash on the black-and-white photo that A. K. Lowell had on her desk, which I’d seen the night I’d gone there for dinner, after tennis. A.K., in a summer dress, was standing beside Schlomo Dove. She was taller. His arm was around her. Ike White was standing farther off to one side. Schlomo had been A.K’s training analyst at the Freudian Institute. Schlomo had been Ike’s training analyst too. A.K. had had a six-year-long analysis with Schlomo, five days a week. Ike too. Like Lily and Zoe, in the photo A.K. was young and tall and slender. Her nose was still big and bent, but soon to be straightened. Her light brown hair was short.
‘Schlomo must have been screwing her too,’ I said. ‘During her analysis with him. She’s the perfect victim for us – impeccable credentials, and she must have taken notes during her analysis, about everything that went on. And she’s tough. No-one could rattle her on the witness stand.’
‘But she’d never admit it.’
‘I can force her.’
‘You have proof?’
‘I might. That’s why we’re heading back.’
As we drove back down from the mountains, we felt more connected than we’d been in a year. Over and over in my mind I saw that black-and-white photo of the three of them – a smiling Schlomo with his arm around a tentatively smiling young Jewish woman in a summer dress, and there, apart a little, with a pained look on his face, little Isaac White.