Mount Misery

by Samuel Shem

  Schlomo testified under oath that he could not possibly have abused A.K. because he had been impotent for a decade at least. In a spectacular piece of bravado, his wife Dixie Dove took the stand and, with a humility that was truly heart-wrenching, said:

  ‘Yes, Schlomo Dove has been important for at least the last ten years.’

  Everyone cracked up. Schlomo laughed as hard as anyone. He was enjoying this, his moment of national – hell, international – fame. Half of Hollywood – the psychoanalyzed half – was said to be calling. He was becoming a star.

  In cross-examination, A.K.’s lawyer, a fit, handsome fortyish man named Darney, leaped on this ‘limp-penis defense.’ He introduced extensive notes from A.K.’s contemporaneous journal describing Schlomo’s erect penis in no small detail.

  ‘And even if you were impotent, Dr Dove,’ Darney said, voice rising in accusation, ‘have you not fingers? A tongue? Toes? Toes, Dr Dove, have you not toes?’

  Attention turned to Schlomo. We all half expected Schlomo to say, ‘No, they’ve all been amputated, your honor.’ But no. Shaking his head in wonderment, Schlomo said, ‘Toes, ten. Tsouris, plenty.’

  How could you not smile at this?

  Finally, after seeing much legal infighting around Exhibit A, the condoms in the Ziploc bag, the jury saw Exhibit B, the bananas. A.K testified that these were used by Schlomo for masturbating her. Schlomo testified that they were used to make sure his potassium level stayed normal, as he was on diuretics for his heart failure, which, in his words, ‘is killing me slowly, and deep down is the cause of my impotence.’

  Ms Green, Schlomo’s sweet young reptile of a lawyer, tried everything to demolish A.K.’s character. She quoted from Schlomo’s voluminous notes from his psychoanalysis of her. Nothing suggested the slightest physical involvement. All described just what a depraved sick person A.K. really was. She’d changed her name. She’d changed her nose. Was this not proof of instability?

  But A.K. too had taken notes on her psychoanalysis with Schlomo, notes that described in lurid detail their several years of sexual acts. In addition, A.K. was now a respected member of the psychoanalytic community, and marched out witness after witness attesting to her fine character. After all, she had been analyzed, hadn’t she, by one of the self-confessed ‘best analysts in town, if not the world’ – Schlomo Dove. Hadn’t Dr Dove, head of the Freudian Institute, put his imprimatur upon her, terminating with her successfully? Hadn’t Schlomo, when she’d gone to him for a match with an analyst, told her, ‘You have all the warmth of the sun, but you keep giving it away to others, leaving you sad and lonely’ – and then kept her for himself?

  Beside me, Zoe and Lily Putnam squirmed at these words.

  The trial kept moving from this sense of human tragedy to farce. Some of it was so surreal that after it happened you couldn’t believe that it had happened, except that it had. It was like America in that way, where, ever since Nixon, really, anything you thought of as a flagrant exaggeration of reality turned out, years later, to be a gross underestimate. In just a few decades the surreal in our country had turned real. What did this say about what would count as reality in our future?

  The most surreal exchanges were around the Schlomo penis.

  Schlomo’s lawyer asked A.K. whether the Schlomo penis was circumsized.

  ‘Yes,’ A.K. said.

  ‘It would please the court,’ Ms Green said with a dramatic flourish of her arms and in the voice of a premenstrual diva, ‘that the correct answer is “only partially.” The Schlomo Dove penis is only partially circumsized!’ Dramatic pause. ‘Your honor, I rest my case.’

  Schlomo beamed with pride. As his lawyer sat, he gave her a high five.

  ‘One of the main bones of contention,’ said Darney, A.K.’s lawyer, in what I thought was a particularly inept turn of phrase, ‘is the doctor’s penis. On the one hand, is it circumsized? On the other hand, is it not? Is it perenially flaccid, or is it capable of erection? Your honor, defense claims it is “only partially” circumsized – whatever that boils down to, and – to quote Dr Dove’s words in his deposition – “always soft as linguini.” Parenthetically, I would point out that there is linguini, and there is linguini. Uncooked, it is hard. The phrase “al dente” also comes to mind.’ The judge rolled his eyes, and gestured counsel to get on with it. ‘Your honor, counsel sees no other route than to have Dr Schlomo Dove’s penis examined by a medical expert, to see if, number one, it is circumsized or not, and number two, if it can maintain an erection.’

  ‘What?’ Schlomo screamed, shooting to his feet, ‘you wanna see if I can get it up?’

  ‘Objection!’ Ms Green screamed, shooting to her feet at the same time. ‘The penis is a red herring!’

  ‘Oy, what a slip!’ Schlomo said.

  ‘OhmyGod,’ Ms Green said.

  Everyone cracked up, even the judge.

  Banging his gavel, shaking his craggy head, the judge then called the attorneys to the side bar. They argued heatedly. The judge recessed, and called them into his chambers. We adjourned for the day.

  The next day the judge ruled against A.K. The crafty old judge hinted that – perhaps fearing Dershowitz sinking his teeth into it – the penis would be an awkward exhibit to maintain at the appellate level, ‘if it could get up that far.’ The Schlomo penis was put to rest. Advantage, Dove.

  The judge charged the jury on ‘the burden of proof’ in such strict terms that it seemed to me our case was lost. Schlomo had been mesmerizing, A.K. unfathomable. Mr Darney pointed out that in mesmerizing the members of the jury, Schlomo was doing exactly what had been done to seduce A.K. Further, Darney painted a vivid picture of how A.K.’s cool hiddenness and ‘sour demeanor’ were the result of being an abuse survivor. But even to us this seemed a last-ditch effort by a desperate advocate, incidental, doomed to fail.

  Berry and I left for our drive to Arizona. The jury stayed out five days. A finding for Schlomo, the defendant, seemed inevitable.

  Last night we got the verdict, in Zoe’s overnight letter.

  The jury found for the plaintiff, A. K. Lowell, on all counts.

  A sweet victory for A.K. Only Berry and I and A.K. herself knew just how sweet. I would return her ledger to her. Her own abuse of Oly Joe would remain a secret.

  But what did the victory really mean? It was a civil not a criminal victory. Schlomo had been convicted of no crime. His legal expenses, and the monetary awards to A.K., whatever they would turn out to be, would be paid by his malpractice insurance. He would not do a single day in jail, or pay a single penny. In fact, since the award could be as high as a million, all of our malpractice premiums would go up, including mine. We would wind up paying, not him. He himself would no longer be required to carry malpractice, since now he would lose his license. Even though he would no longer have a license, there was nothing in the law to keep him from seeing patients as usual, as long as he didn’t prescribe them drugs, which he didn’t do anyway. His practice might well flourish.

  Now that he was famous, a household name, he might well make a killing with a book, a film, a mini-series.

  In her letter, Zoe said:

  Schlomo’s lawyers called me, and Lily, and want to settle out of court. To spare everybody embarrassment, and since he’s already been found guilty, we probably will.

  TALL is going great. The number of abusers around here is incredible. There’s talk of making it a national hot line.

  The bill to make sex with a patient a crime is still stalled in the legislature. A state rep named DiMesi keeps shelving it. He’s a lawyer with a local practice. When someone asked him why he keeps shelving it, he said, ‘You think I’m gonna get behind somethin’ dat says it’s illegal for me to pinch my client’s ass?’

  But I can’t tell you how happy I am, to be working for TALL, doing something I believe in! We’re all standing TALL!

  Do you know how important you were to me that whole year? How important you still are? You were, you are. Thank you fo
r my life.

  In friendship, Zoe

  P.S. Any more news of Dr Malik?

  Now we sit across the stream from the White House ruin. Our eyes sometimes rest on the cave mouth and dwellings, sometimes are drawn up the face of the cliff, up the sheer mass along the streaks of purple and red leaking down the rock from the rim and glistening with eons of leachate, metallic ore, dark iron. I take the letter out of my shirt pocket. Fingers trembling, I open it. We read it together.

  Our friend Leonard Malik died peacefully today. The body will be cremated and its ashes scattered here in Himalayas. Donations in his memory may be sent to any endeavor which, in his words, ‘promotes an enquiry into the meaning of life, or to the orphanage here.’ He asked us to write to you, his dear friend, and to leave you with this message:

  ‘Find the breath, kid. Don’t forget to breathe.’

  With you in sorrow,

  V. Thakar

  I find myself smiling. Now I see what he had been showing me all year long. Suffering is forgetfulness, forgetting to breathe, forgetting to be with the life-breath, the spirit. Healing is connection. Isn’t that all, isn’t that it?

  My mind’s eye fills with Malik, from the first time I saw him, on the tennis court when I mistook him for a patient and Mr K. for a doctor, through all the ‘clicks’ I’d felt with him, to my doing the physical on him when he pointed to the acromial knobs of his shoulders and said, ‘I haven’t seen these bones since I was eight years old,’ and finally to our sitting in silence, saying goodbye. He had asked me for help. I had given it. We had helped each other.

  I see him sitting front and center in the photo I carry with me at all times, the color photo of our ragtag group at the airport: his body is sagging, as if against an inner dark weight, and leans to one side. His face is pale and constrained, more pale even than Zoe’s face, and more constrained even than Bronia’s, but his eyes are alight. He is free.

  ‘It’s so simple. That was his gift, to show me how simple it is.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Berry asks sleepily.

  ‘How to be with people, help them grow. What helps is this, just this.’

  ‘Mmm. Everything’s simple,’ she murmurs, ‘if you’re really here.’

  ‘It’s like seeing and loving go together.’

  ‘That’s excellent, yes.’

  We sit together in the stillness, in the movement of connection with each other and with nature. The line between living and dead seems fuzzy, as if you could cross back and forth easily. This letter from India might help us cross, if we wish, but urges us to stay on this side for now, watching the flow of the stream and the flow of our grieving, part of all that is human and even all that is not human but merely life, even the life of the stream and the life of the rock.

  Suddenly I realize that the night before I had had my first dream about my father since his death. I tell Berry about it.

  ‘He was running upstairs to the second floor of our old house, the two-family we owned. Rabbi Ritvo rented the other half. My father was wearing his raincoat and his rain hat – he looked like a salesman back from a two-week road trip. The hat was one of those brimmed ones, from the thirties. He ran upstairs and seemed eager to talk to me. Eager, but worried. His voice was shaky – either with fear or with love, I don’t know which – he’d often get teary when he first saw me again after I’d been away for a while – and he said to me, “Son, I’ve just been named Best Dentist on the Jolly Jews basketball team!” And I said, with enthusiasm, “That’s great, Dad!”’

  ‘Wonderful dream,’ Berry says. ‘You’ve made peace with him now.’

  ‘With his spirit, yeah.’ I think of poor Cherokee Putnam, having the colossal bad luck to get me as his therapist during my love affair with Sigmund Freud. If he’d gotten Malik, or me now, he’d still be alive. I say to Berry, ‘You know, I think I understand how to help people now, I really do.’

  ‘Shhh. She’s asleep, so we should get some sleep too.’ Snuggling in, she murmurs, ‘But that’s good, Roy, that’s real good. That’s why you wanted to be a doctor in the first place, right? Mmmm.’

  I raise my eyes above the green tufts of the cottonwoods and aspens to the White House ruin, sitting atop the other stone dwellings, and see how the humans who’d lived there a thousand years ago are a part of the rock, by virtue of their endeavor and understanding, and then my sight enlarges to take in the teardrop-shaped cave, and I see how the dwellings are a part of the cave, by virtue of the humans, and then my eyes start up the cliff face, and I see how the cleft is part of the cliff, by virtue of the wind and the rain, and then my eyes slip up the cliff face between two iron oxide streaks to the rim, seeing how the declivity of the canyon is part of the plateau, by virtue of the wind and the water and the fire in the earth, and then my vision lifts lightly up off the trampoline of the rim into the desert sky the color of tropical water, seeing how the sky is part of the earth, by virtue of life itself. That fact is the Divine: the being part of the whole.

  And I see how psychiatry had been a mutilation of the Divine, the ripping apart of the fabric, the fragmenting of the whole into parts, the taking of what was in fact the breathing of the soul – the whole rich unknown life of the spirit – and cramming it into a tiny island of the known, named ‘psychology.’

  Ike White. Why had he killed himself? Because he lived two seconds ahead of time, or two seconds behind. In expectation, or in memory. He was never present. He never looked you in the eye, never touched you. He had a secret, and that secret was his keeping secrets. He didn’t know how to ask. But why had he killed himself that night, after meeting us, the new residents?

  Was it because he saw our hope, and he knew all the shit, knew from my telling him about Cherokee that day that I was about to wander into all the Schlomo shit and God knows what else and how could he tell a bright young idealistic guy who looked up to him a lot that he’d been fucked up the ass for years by Schlomo Dove and knew that A.K. and God knows how many others had been fucked by Schlomo too? Because he was living a lie and it killed him? He was forty-one and a star, but he felt that compared to other stars he was a failure. Buy in to comparison, try to become more and more and better and better, and you can never be enough, because you can never be. I see it as clearly as this sky, as the edge of this baby’s quilt upon this sand: Buy in to a self-centered way of living and you make it only up into your late thirties maybe your early forties and then your life drops down around you like pants too big for a cancered body and you’re left standing there naked, and even if there’s a trophy in your hand and cash in your pocket, your mouth is full of ashes.

  If Ike White died of any ‘fatal disease,’ that was it: the time bomb of the self. I too had come close, that butterfly needle poised over that bulging vein in my antecubital fossa. And this is normal male life? No. Healthy growth is through and toward connection. We don’t have to be heroes, and our alternative is not being wimps. We’ve just got to live human-sized lives.

  Berry and I and Lizzie Qun are here to start living in a place where spirit is not split off and mocked, where, without self-consciousness, we can start to talk about being part of this wholeness, this spiritual life, this faith in life carried on the stream of connections, this sense that if there is a ‘self’ it came as an attempt to organize the onrush of associations from our overriding brain cortex, that any ‘self’ is made up only and wholly of ‘nonself’ parts, and that we can no more use the old way of thinking about ‘self’ and ‘other’ without regard for the mutual connections than we can, at the other end of the spectrum, use the old way of thinking of particles of matter, because the new physics has shown that there are no such things as isolated Newtonian particles like those little plastic balls of organic chemistry, but rather that what we call ‘particles’ of matter are in fact only the mutual relationships among the particles, which means, if you really take that in, that the universe is made up not of fundamental pieces but of a pliant fabric of mutual co-arisings, of relationsh
ips and connections, of the very stuff which we, split off as humans, aspire to rejoin.

  ‘This rock,’ I say to Berry, ‘is energy, like the sky.’

  But she’s asleep. Lizzie’s asleep. I sleep.

  After a while our baby awakens us. We put her in the Tough Traveler and head upstream toward the trail mouth, which leads up, and out.

  Gaining the rim, Lizzie on my back babbling with all the strength of the sun, everything being more real, bulging and blazing, my heart feels ripe. I sense the baby’s energy field, surrounding my head like a halo, reminding me that there’s a whole other world out there, beyond words, to which she is attuned, like when she knows that our cat is in the room before she can see or hear it, or when she senses in a person – no matter how attentive to her – a phoniness, and she flinches, turns away and starts to cry. These energies exist, in that world of mere being.

  Catching my breath in the rare high air, I turn with Berry and look back, out over the vista, down to where we’d been.

  ‘If there’s a heaven,’ I say, ‘this is it.’

  ‘Khreeeeh op!’ says Lizzie Qun, our present moment.

  We laugh. Lizzie laughs. We laugh more. Lizzie laughs more.

  ‘I’m so happy!’ I say. ‘No-one ever tells you, with a baby, how much fun it is!’

  ‘How could they? It’s not something you can tell.’

  ‘Isn’t it true,’ I ask, ‘that before Lizzie Qun, we only seemed to learn things through suffering, and now we’re learning through joy?’

  ‘Sweetie!’ she says, squeezing my hand. And then suddenly she lets go. ‘Uh-oh.’

  ‘What?’

  Berry sniffs our baby’s bottom. ‘She needs changing.’

  ‘Who doesn’t?’

  ‘Where’s the diaper?’

  We find the diaper, and lay Lizzie Qun down on the hood of our truck. She smiles, and reaches a hand up toward us, or maybe toward the sky.

  LAWS OF MOUNT MISERY

  Laws of Mount Misery