Mount Misery

by Samuel Shem

  As Schlomo went on, his audience sat mesmerized, like snakes by a world-class charmer. Why couldn’t I speak? Was I a coward? A defective person? Were Henry and Hannah too? Malik had said that what hurts the victim is not only the cruelty of the abuser but the silence of the bystander. Berry had told me that for women who had been sexually abused as children, the worst was when they’d been put in the position of knowing that their younger sister was being abused, and had not been able to speak up. I decided I had to say something. I braced myself. I would stand up and interrupt him. On three. One, two …

  But I could not. What would I say? How would I say it? It was too big, and the weight of false histories in the room too heavy.

  Schlomo went on, gathering momentum, drawing the audience toward him by his being such a high-class mensch. He finished. Applause rolled up toward him. Bowing, smiling, dancing on his toes as the applause splashed over him, he asked, ‘Any questions?’

  Silence.

  Now. I tried harder to gather my thoughts. As soon as I got one in line, I felt the pressure of my heart pounding and the eyes that would be upon me as heavy as rocks, and the line broke, and my mind went blank. I looked to Henry and Hannah. Both sat still, as if turned to stone.

  Crack!

  We jumped at the sound. A gunshot? We turned toward it, behind us in the back.

  A. K. Lowell was on her feet again, her snapped yellow pencil in her upraised hands. Her face was flushed with fury. Suddenly I knew what she was about to do.

  ‘You pervert!’ she said. ‘You have sexually abused your patients for years. You sexually abused me for years.’

  Schlomo’s hands fumbled at his chest as if he’d been shot having a heart attack and then drifted slowly down to his crotch.

  A.K. walked out.

  All eyes turned back to Schlomo, who stood stock-still.

  ‘Let’s go!’ I said happily, loudly, to Henry and Hannah.

  ‘Let’s make our move!’ Henry said.

  ‘Cool!’ Hannah said.

  The three of us stood up and walked. We walked lightly, triumphantly, walked straight on through the deadweight of all these normalized eyes, walked up the aisle and out the door in solidarity with Aliyah K. Lowenschteiner.

  Our triumph was short-lived. An hour later Mr Beef Telly and Misery Security came to my office to escort me to Dr Lloyal von Nott’s office. As I passed by Viv’s bulletproof, our eyes met. In her eyes I saw fear.

  A plush carpet gave way to a plusher carpet. I was face-to-face with Lloyal von Nott and Nash Michaels and the chairman of the board of Misery. They were all dressed identically in funereal suits and flat boxy ties, as if by a mother of triplets. Lloyal and Nash looked bad, older, burnt out. Lines like scratches spread across their foreheads, out from the corners of their eyes, and down in defining arcs from their nostrils to their masseters. With the hospital having lost its battle with the insurance industry, they’d been under a lot of pressure. Recently they had responded by releasing a high-gloss and soothing ‘Annual Misery Report,’ which made it sound like the hospital was as successful as Disneyworld. As I stared at them I saw them as shiny, buffed to a sheen with secrets, their lies a patina of denial.

  ‘Hello,’ I said nervously. I felt vulnerable and alone. All my life I’d been in these situations in schools, called in before principals.

  ‘Goodbye,’ von Nott said, from behind his desk.

  ‘What?’

  Mr Telly’s walkie-talkie squawked. He and Security moved to narrow the sightline to von Nott, as if to shield him from me, a Secret Service move.

  ‘You are hereby informed,’ said Nash Michaels in a voice of Formica, ‘that this conversation is being recorded. If you would like to have your own counsel present, we will stop right now.’

  ‘What’s this all about?’

  ‘Counsel refused,’ Nash said, eyes slithering up to the ceiling. The Toshiba transceiver, which went both ways, was on.

  ‘We shan’t keep you,’ von Nott said.

  ‘I’m in no hurry.’

  ‘Ah, but you are. Your contract expires at midnight of thirty June, Wednesday next. We shan’t renew your contract. On one July you are history.’

  ‘You can’t do that.’

  ‘We have. You have failed. You are a failure. Your career is over.’

  The word ‘failure’ bit into me. My dream – my father’s dream – of my being a doctor was over. ‘B-b-but y-you have no grounds.’

  Von Nott pointed to a thick manila folder on his desk. ‘Grounds aplenty.’

  ‘Y-y-you’re getting rid of me b-because I saw Schlomo D-D-Dove have sexual intercourse with Zoe.’

  ‘You saw nothing.’

  ‘I know what I saw.’

  ‘You saw nothing.’

  ‘Are you saying I didn’t see what I saw?’

  ‘You saw nothing. Unless you saw what wasn’t there. This, perhaps you’ve learned this year, is called an hallucination.’

  ‘A. K. Lowell, today in grand rounds—’

  ‘We don’t take cases,’ Nash said, ‘that we can lose.’

  Suddenly the breath seemed to go out of me. I felt weak and light-headed. I felt silenced.

  The door burst open. Telly crouched, reaching for his stun-gun.

  ‘Solini?’ I cried out. The little guy stood there, rolling his wrists.

  ‘When Viv calls stat, you move! You pull a Malik – you stick together!’

  ‘Get out,’ von Nott said.

  ‘Fuck you!’

  ‘Dr Basch has just been terminated, and you—’

  ‘Fuck you!’ Henry shouted, and reached into his jacket. Von Nott ducked down behind his desk; Telly and Security and the chairman dropped to the rug.

  What? They thought Henry was reaching for a weapon?

  It was a letter. Throwing it down on the glossy desk, he shouted, ‘Fuck you! I fuckin’ quit and fuck you!’

  All at once I saw it. Their having their thugs and lawyers and board chairs here, their ducking down behind desks. ‘Henry! They’re afraid of us!’

  ‘Scared shitless of us, man, yeah!’

  ‘You guys,’ I said, ‘are afraid of us!’

  ‘Tell it, Roy! Of us!’

  The three men in suits exchanged glances. This was outside protocol, beyond the flowcharts and dangling boxes that defined them.

  In that moment I saw all the other people that year who’d died and left, died and left. All of them were standing with us, sticking together with us. Even dead and gone their presence right then right there in that pathetic office was vital, powerful. They were here with Henry and me. We all were crowding out these three boys before us, crowding them out, these three boys dressed up so hard to look like real men. Standing there, I saw, in these men, dead souls. Much as in real medicine I’d learned to see death itself; flitting like a lost moth around people’s bodies. I felt a rush of joy, and said, ‘You fuckers are scared to death of us.’

  ‘To like death, man!’ Henry sang out, squinching up his face. He was rolling now. ‘And one more thing: fuck you!’

  ‘Ridiculous,’ von Nott said, standing back up. I’m sure he thought that his face was stone. But the denial was so thin, splotches of the real bled through. He’d been found out, his secret seen.

  ‘Scared to death!’ I said joyfully. ‘And fuck you all!’

  ‘Diddily diddily death!’ Henry sang.

  ‘As we often said in Europe during the war,’ von Nott said, ‘“You haven’t a snowball’s chance in hell.”’

  ‘The war?’ I asked, surprised he’d bring that up now. ‘And where were you during the war?’

  ‘In Switzerland. I was neutral.’

  ‘In that war, you were neutral?’

  ‘Get out.’

  Looking at each in turn, into each set of eyes calcified by cash and deception, I said, ‘You are dead souls. Dead fucking souls. And you’re being killed like you killed Ike White.’

  ‘Like Ike, man!’ Solini said. ‘Tell it!’

&nbs
p; ‘Out!’

  ‘“Check out the real situation – check it out check it out!”’ Henry sang.

  We danced out, shaking hips, waving index fingers, jiving, singing Bob.

  Carried down the hallway on our exhilaration, we found ourselves staring at a nameplate:

  SCHLOMO DOVE, M.D., F.R.A.P.S.

  ‘Let’s do Schlomo!’ Henry shouted.

  ‘Yeah!’ I said, and was about to bang on the door when I was stopped by a weird sound coming from inside his office, a raspy sound like when you try to shift gears with a bum clutch. Then I recognized it. It was the defining sound of our times. ‘A shredder?’

  ‘Turning the truth, man, into confetti. Be cool, Roy. Catch you later.’

  Solini walked away, to see a patient. I walked over to Viv. She buzzed me in.

  ‘Thanks for sending Solini,’ I said, feeling safe behind the bulletproof. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘Cowboy, you looked bad! So how’d it go?’

  I told her. As I spoke, the lift left me. I started to feel down, really down. What had I done?

  ‘Congratulations,’ Viv said.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Bein’ fired from Misery. Wear it like the Congressional Medal of Honor.’

  ‘Terrific. I’ll have to change the title of my autobiography from “Notes of an Overachiever” to “I Was a Failure at Misery.”’

  ‘Failure? In whose eyes, theirs? Thank God they dint call you a success!’ I laughed. ‘Listen, Cowboy-doll,’ she said, her long fake lashes flying up toward her blond beehive, so that her hazel eyes widened. ‘I’ve seen it over and over again: if you’re any good, they get rid of you. No-one who’s any good stays long in Mount Misery.’

  How right she was. They’d gotten rid of anyone ‘on the beam’: me and Henry and Hannah and Malik and Geneva Hooevens, and many other good therapists, now out in the community. They had succeeded in weeding us out. We were history, soon to be revised. In a few years the word would be that Ike White had not killed himself at all but had died of a fatal disease, say a heart attack, why not? Nobody would be around to tell the truth.

  All over America sincere, intelligent, sensitive, and enthusiastic young men and women were heading into these training programs. They hoped to open up even more, and learn how to help those caught in the hell of mental illness. Instead they would learn to close down and shut down and become someone special. They would buy terrific cars and after years of training be able to look into the mirror and – rather than see the truth of the person looking back out of the mirror – see the image.

  There would always be a Lloyal, a Nash, always be an Errol, always a Heiler, a Schlomo Dove. The bad news is that you get rid of one, and another takes his place. The good news is that in rising, they are all dying.

  And maybe the better news is that with psychiatrists becoming drug pushers instead of listeners, the actual work with human beings will devolve to the ones better at it, the nurses and social workers and mental health workers and alcoholics and addicts in recovery and pastoral counselors way down the flowchart of Misery, who in many ways had done the most to help patients this year. Those who, with patients day in and day out, through chance encounters and common sense, offering man-on-the-street wisdom gained through facing the suffering in their own lives, helped people heal. Like the basically cheerful often dark-skinned workers in Buildings and Grounds who talked with patients while emptying the trash or mopping the floor or cutting the grass. Years later, if you asked a former patient what had made a difference to make them better, they would point not to a drug or a shrink, but to a connection made with one of these people. These Vivs. And one of the most hopeful signs, now, was how patients themselves were organizing, forming support groups with like-minded others, like Zoe’s TALL for the abused, or MDA – Manic Depressive Association – to empower each other to find sensible, commonsense therapists out in the community, and to resist the authority of the world experts in the great institutions, all the Miserys.

  ‘But people think these jackasses are good therapists,’ I said to Viv, ‘these world experts. When a relative gets in trouble, people ask their doctor to find them “the best psychiatrist” and they get thrown to guys like von Nott, or Heiler, or Errol – or Schlomo! There’s no way to measure who’s any good. Everything takes place behind closed doors. Nobody knows.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Simple. With the good ones, their patients get better.’

  ‘And what makes them get better?’

  ‘Onny one thing matters, I mean really.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘If they like you.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘I know.’ She smiled. ‘They like you, Roy. And so do I.’

  ‘It’s mutual. You are something else!’

  ‘No foolin’.’

  ‘But what about Cherokee?’

  ‘That was a very bad tragedy. But you learned from it. Nothin’ this whole year taught you as much as him, God bless ’im.’ She blew her nose, loudly. ‘So anyways, send me a picher postcard sometimes, willya?’

  ‘I don’t know where I’ll be.’

  ‘You can always call collect.’

  ‘How can you stand it here?’

  ‘Somebody’s got to, right? What can we do? We can’t just walk. Besides,’ she said, patting her bluish-blond beehive, ‘women like me are getting in line to inherit the earth. Can I ask you one favor?’

  ‘Anything.’

  ‘Can I kiss you?’

  I blushed, and my head had barely nodded when I felt her teeth clack against mine – holy moley what an overbite! – and then her lips were on mine, and then to my surprise there was a quick flicker of her tongue on mine.

  ‘Remember, Cowboy. You can always call Misery collect.’

  My lady in black, Christine, sat with me in my office up in Toshiba late that afternoon. Still Madonna-platinum, she wore a sleeveless black blouse, short black shirt, and black tights with flowers entwining up toward no-man’s-land. Her nails and lips were scarlet. I told her I would be leaving Mount Misery.

  ‘What? How can you do this to me?’ she said. ‘After all this, you leave? What the hell’s wrong with you? Why are you doing this?’

  I wanted to tell her I’d been fired, but I couldn’t. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I know it makes you angry—’

  ‘You bet! Unbelievable. I take this very seriously. You don’t!’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Yeah, sure. Oh boy. Maybe I’ve been wrong about you. I mean you knew how suicidal Cherokee was,’ she said, her anger rising, ‘and about his big insurance policies that were coming due. I know you couldn’t tell me, but couldn’t you have somehow warned me?’

  I felt a hit of dread, a snakebite in my gut.

  ‘Well?’ She stared at me, wild-eyed. ‘C’mon – respond!’

  Her inflamed anger inflamed my dread. Feeling trapped, I backed away emotionally. Pure dread – old, familiar. Dreadlock.

  ‘Oh God,’ she said in disgust, tapping a scarlet nail on the arm of the chair.

  But then something new happened. All at once I saw this dread so clearly, it began to lessen. For the first time in my life I saw that it was not my psychopathology festering under the enamel of my mind, but merely a fact, called dread. Over and over, through millions of deflections of love, I had learned to become an agent of disconnection, in the name of becoming a man. As women had come toward me in love, I had fled, imagining that I had to do something to win that love. Then I realized: it’s not just me, it’s all of us men, trying to become champions. We run from the love that is there for the asking, to try to become champions, to win the love we are running from. We men run.

  I saw, then, the mean-spiritedness of theories that blamed our mothers or fathers for this. It isn’t our mothers or fathers, it’s what we learn about preserving the myth of our separate selves by disconnecting from relationships. It’s not sick, it’s normal. It’s all of us normal men cau
ght in the most violent and fragmented time of human history, screwing it up together. When old men call us ‘soft’ for being too connected, and tell us we need to become more quintessentially male, we follow like sheep. And all the while what we need to do is not become more male, but be more connected. Mutually.

  All this shot through my mind in an instant. Seeing it so clearly, as not only about me but about my gender, it seemed to ease and lose its grip on me. The muscles of my neck softened. My shoulders eased down. I breathed. The softening and easing and breathing made me realize how hardened and tight I’d been – I’d actually been holding my breath. Breathing out, I felt a touch of humility. Breathing in, calm. I said:

  ‘Cherokee never told me just how suicidal he was, or about any insurance policies. What did he tell you? Maybe we can understand it, together?’

  ‘You didn’t know?’

  ‘No, I’m sorry to say I didn’t.’

  ‘Did you ask?’

  ‘I tried.’

  ‘Terrific,’ she said sarcastically, looking down into her lap.

  I understood. The issue wasn’t me, or her, but us. The ‘we’ in the room, which seemed so solid right then that you could shape it, yet so ephemeral that it was the unseen historical forces shaping you. It wasn’t my dread, but merely dread; not her anger, but merely anger. The psychopathology wasn’t in her or in me, but in the way that we were meeting. Perhaps there was no such thing as ‘psychopathology’ at all.

  My job right then was to hold this ‘we,’ this connection with her, hold it for both of us. That was my job as a doctor. To use my experience with others who had suffered and my vision born of that experience to bring someone who is out on the edge of the so-called ‘sick’ into the current of the human. To take what seems foreign in a person and see it as native. This is healing. This process is what the healing process is. This is what I signed up for, years ago. This is what old Dr Starbuck in Columbia did, taking care of the town, inviting me into medicine. This is what I had done moonlighting. This is what good doctors do. We are with people at crucial moments in their lives, healing. How hard it had gotten, in these hellish hospitals and institutions encrusted with machines and desiccated hearts and dead souls, to get back to authentic suffering, authentic healing. How much we have lost.