Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil

by Rafael Yglesias

  He decided I ought to be a scientist. “You’re too smart to be wasted on business,” he told me in his study, by the pool, or late at night in my room. Always the same words: “You’re too smart to be wasted on business. Of course you could turn my millions into billions but that would be a disgrace. With my resources you could cure cancer.” He confided to me, on my fifteenth birthday, that he had disinherited his son, taken care of his daughter through stock options for his son-in-law and that I would receive at least fifty percent of the bulk of his estate if he died before his wife, and all of it if she predeceased him. “But she’ll bury me is my guess,” he added in a neutral tone. “You take those millions and do something that the world will remember forever.” He paused and looked thoughtful. His eyes glistened. I wondered if the shimmering was incipient tears. He stood up and said casually, “Just remember to mention my name at the Nobel ceremony.”

  “Thank you, Uncle.”

  He came over, ran his thick warm hand across the wispy hairs of my baby beard and whispered, “You’re a good son,” hurrying out before I could answer.

  I thought myself so clever and deceiving. I didn’t like him. I was grateful and moved that he had thrown over his son for me and I thought him bad and weak for doing so. Such ambivalence, this dual judgment of every situation, was my continual state.

  Of course the unstable chemistry of my personality finally ignited. The match was my beautiful, good-hearted cousin Julie. My sexuality had been so compromised that for years she had been the focus of my fantasies. It is glaringly obvious, at this distance, why I would be attracted to a female family member who believed in equal rights for blacks and for an end to the Vietnam War, a passionate Jewish woman who felt protective toward me, who always looked past my precocious intelligence to the hidden lonely boy. I didn’t have that insight into my libido: I was mesmerized by the movement of her white breasts under her black leotards and the fall of her shimmering black hair down her firm back.

  In 1968 Julie was a senior at Columbia University. She had joined SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), a left-wing organization which was, that very year, beginning its transformation from a non-violent anti—Vietnam War organization into what would eventually become the ill-fated terrorist splinter group, the Weather Underground. As late as 1968, Julie’s family and Bernie didn’t appreciate—nor did the rest of America—how serious those young demonstrators were about changing the basic structures of American life: eliminating institutionalized racism, capitalism and imperialism. Julie was still regarded by her family as a bright, good girl whose participation in peace marches, lack of makeup and torn jeans were merely symptoms of a harmless phase, the young adult equivalent of an adolescent girl’s fascination with horses.

  [That analysis is not entirely wrong. The faith that society can be altered may flourish in middle and old age, but is far more likely to bloom in people with little experience; and the bravado required to take arms against the world’s greatest military power is easiest to find in the invulnerable delusions of youth. We are animals, although we expend so much effort convincing ourselves we aren’t, and the chemistry of explosive growth in adolescence, full maturity in the twenties and the rapidly accelerating decay of middle and old age are powerful tides that push and pull our supposedly objective brains from idealism to pessimism. Nevertheless, some revolutions succeed and others fail.]

  That same year, my sixteenth, Uncle put me up for participation in a program at Columbia University created to nurture precocious math students. Dr. Raymond Jericho, a professor at Columbia, taking note of the historical fact that all great theoretical mathematicians had begun their breakthrough work while still adolescents and completed it by their early twenties, amassed a small fortune in grants to gather bright kids from the area, aiming to discover another Isaac Newton. We met on Friday nights and all day Saturdays at the university, so our regular schooling wouldn’t be disrupted. The Times did a piece about us on the first day we met, dubbing it the “genius program.” Even then the publicity struck me as a sign that Dr. Jericho didn’t have his priorities straight. I got into hot water with him immediately, because I told the Times reporter, when asked what my specialty was, that I was working on an equation for time travel. “Really?” the reporter began to scribble and moved toward me. “He’s kidding,” Dr. Jericho said and punished me by forbidding me to work with Yo-Yo Suki (who later did important work in chaos theory) on cracking the Beroni paradox.

  “It’s too hard,” Jericho told us.

  “But you said we’re geniuses,” Yo-Yo said with his now famous deadpan. In those days, it baffled everyone.

  “You two shouldn’t be paired,” Jericho said. “I’ve studied your files and you’re too alike.”

  Yo-Yo, a very short, plump and pale Japanese boy with thick glasses, looked up at me—a six-foot-tall Jewish-Spanish kid, and in the best shape of my life thanks to swimming and tennis. Yo-Yo finished his survey and said, “Congratulations Dr. Jericho, you’ve just rewritten genetics as we know it.”

  We were an odd group of teenagers. That remark caused the room to laugh as hard as if we had been watching the Three Stooges and Mo had been decked with a two-by-four.

  Our meetings began in January. By February, I was disheartened. It was the first chink in the armor of my image as the brightest student in America—an image that I believed was crucial to maintain my uncle’s love and to secure his money. Of course (and this made it worse) the flaw was visible at that time only to me. We were divided in groups of four and asked to solve mathematical mysteries. My partners weren’t the most brilliant (indeed, none of them distinguished themselves later in life, as did Yo-Yo and another boy, Stephan Gorecki) but it became apparent to me that although my partners were average for the group, they were much faster than I, both in calculation and in grasping theory. After four sessions, I had nothing to contribute to the group meetings, and it took hours upon hours of hard work between sessions for me to do the relatively routine homework on transitional proofs, proofs that had been discovered centuries ago. I knew I was seriously out of my depth when a student named Jerry Timmerman tossed an equation I had worked on for thirty hours back at me, commenting, “This is junk. If you’re not going to really work hard you shouldn’t be here. What did you do? Scribble this on the subway?”

  My only pleasure in this genius training derived from the fact that Julie’s apartment—which she shared with two other seniors—was a block away and she had offered to put me up on Friday nights. My uncle agreed to that, probably because it left him free to be alone with his mistress in his Manhattan pied-à-terre. After the battering Friday evening sessions, I staggered, defeated and frightened, down the long hill on 116th Street to be greeted by these women, bra-less under their peasant blouses, sometimes padding naked to the bathroom late at night or early in the morning, passing my bed on the living room couch, the flash of their bleached breasts and shadowed vaginas all the more exciting because of their sleepy and unselfconscious presentation. The gap in age—I was sixteen, the women were twenty-one—was apparently enormous to them. At least, that was my interpretation of why they thought nothing of having breakfast beside me in panties, reaching for the orange juice so that their T-shirts billowed out to reveal a dark aureole or a pink one or other fascinating details: a beauty mark on the soft underside, unshaven armpits, nipples hard as rubber one week, soft and quizzical the next. On my fourth visit, Julie noticed me stare at her roommate Kathy’s dark mound, puffy and dark through her white panties. When Kathy left the room, I—erect and breathing hard—finally looked away to find Julie studying me. I had a terrible moment. I was sure, now that she knew I wasn’t a sexless innocent, she would deny me the pleasure of these overnights.

  “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” Julie commented.

  “Who?” I answered brilliantly. I draped my right arm across my lap in case the shape of my ardent penis was discernible.

  “You don’t have to be embarrassed,” Julie said casua
lly. She stood up to return the milk or the coffee—who was paying attention to that?—and showed her own tight buttocks in red panties, not covered by the gray men’s tee she wore to bed. Julie’s breasts were the largest, pushing against the material; her nipples always seemed about to punch through. They greeted me as she turned back to add, “The body is beautiful, you know man?” imitating a flower child, only I didn’t know what she was mimicking.

  [Feminist psychologists have rescued us from grave flaws in theory caused by male assumptions but one of their blind spots is a failure to understand—rather, empathize—with the quite extraordinary difference between the power of visual stimulus for the male, especially the adolescent and young adult male, as measured against female response. Every study conducted, no matter what the prejudice of its authors, has shown that, although women may be stimulated by pornography—especially if it is sensually and beautifully rendered—young men always are, even by a brief, cursory and crude exposure to nudity. Men are highly excited under all conditions, whether in considerable pain, whether their mood is depressed or elevated, whether their expectation is that actual sex is possible, probable or impossible and no matter whether the tantalizing form belongs to someone they know, don’t know, love, hate or fear. The only exceptions are catatonics or other males in extreme states of psychosis. Feminist dismay at this fact of nature too frequently turns to disgust, disguised as thought, or to outright denial. Some have gone as far as to maintain that male response to visual stimuli is a product of socialization, of women being viewed as property. Anyone who has been an eighteen-year-old man knows that conclusion is worse than a flawed perception, it’s dangerous ignorance. Men joke about the decline of sexual response after thirty, but the truth is that for most, it’s a relief. Nature has loosened her enthralling grip just enough to allow at least a semblance of dignified thoughtfulness when presented with the supposedly abstract beauty of the human body.]

  Sandy, the third roommate, appeared from the shower, hair wet, a big blue towel wrapped around her torso, and launched without preamble into an attack on Columbia University’s plan to convert nearby buildings they owned into a gym and also faculty and student housing, in the process evicting poor, mostly black families. Her lecture was pornographic to me, although her square chunky body wasn’t that appealing. Despite the fact that more of her was covered than Kathy and Julie, the simple knowledge that there was nothing on under the terry cloth, that if the tucked-in corner beneath her left arm should slide out I would be two feet from a totally naked woman, forced me to put both arms in my lap. Once again, Julie noticed the glaze in my eyes. She smiled knowingly at me while Sandy went through arguments that linked academic elitism to racism and then to genocide, until (as is always possible when talking abstractions) Columbia’s desire to compete more effectively with their bête noire (Harvard) by keeping admission standards high and luring top-notch professors and students with offers of elegant apartments and new athletic facilities had been transformed into the moral equivalent of slavery and genocide. To my surprise, Sandy addressed most of her diatribe at me, laboriously explaining her terminology, obviously assuming these ideas would be shocking and difficult for me to follow. In fact, thanks to my boyhood, I understood Sandy very well. “We send their kids to die in Vietnam and destroy their communities at home,” Sandy concluded.

  Julie brought Sandy coffee and said, “It’s so depressing.”

  “How do the kids in your school feel about the war?” Sandy asked when I did nothing but stare at her, arms still folded over my lap. She adjusted the top of her towel—it was coming undone slowly, a fraught and suspenseful visual.

  “They don’t like it,” I said.

  “Are they organized?”

  Kathy, now dressed in jeans and a peasant blouse, reappeared. She carried a plastic bag with marijuana and cigarette papers. I knew she was about to roll a joint; I had once seen it done in the bathroom at school. Julie glanced at me a little nervously. “I don’t think he knows what you mean by organize,” Kathy said to Sandy. She noticed Julie’s discomfort about the drug. “Oh,” she said, “I forgot.”

  “You’re against the war, right?” Sandy said.

  “It’s okay,” I said to Kathy. “I don’t care if you roll a joint.” I knew the talk, but they were only words to me. The cool kids at Great Neck High who smoked grass lived side by side with me, so I could see them, but, socially, they were behind an impenetrable glass wall. I belonged to two cliques the hipsters held in contempt: the nerds and the jocks.

  Kathy smiled with relief. “Your cousin told us not to corrupt you, but I forgot.”

  “You’ve smoked?” Julie asked, with some anxiety, which made no sense to me.

  I nodded, unable to speak the lie. I felt the same about this as if she had asked if I were a virgin. It was unmanly to admit my lack of experience.

  “Do you see how unfair it is that we’re sending only the lumpen whites and blacks to fight in Vietnam?” Sandy said.

  “Well, but …” I began, forgetting I didn’t want to engage with her.

  “But what? It’s not unfair?”

  “If you’re against the war, how would it make things better if they sent all kinds to fight?”

  “Because that would stop it. If middle-class white boys were dying over there, everybody would be screaming for it to be over.”

  Kathy and Julie and Sandy looked at me, enjoying (in a friendly way) the beautiful spectacle of what they assumed was a naive boy being illuminated by this insight—or radicalized, to use their jargon. It was awkward for me. I felt I was deeply in love with all three of them, although I thought Sandy was rather stupid and ugly, and that Kathy was a ditz. I admired their idealism and self-confidence and yet I thought they were doomed to fail. Also, I was very vain of my intelligence—which was getting punishing blows in the “genius program.” All in all, I couldn’t stop myself from dropping my guise of disinterest and ignorance of politics to show off. “But all wars are fought by the poor,” I said. “Forty million died in World War II, most of them working-class, and that didn’t end until we had dropped two A-bombs on civilians and pulverized all of Germany’s major cities.”

  “That’s different—” Sandy began.

  “War,” I talked over her, “is the logical end product of a competitive society. Capitalism is the most competitive of all systems and the United States is the purest capitalist nation in history. Without war, the United States would collapse.”

  “Exactly—” Sandy revved up.

  “And so,” I continued, “the government will sacrifice anything, all of us if they have to, to win. Faced with a choice between losing American control of foreign markets and suppressing American citizens, the U.S. will prefer to kill us. From their point of view, they have no choice. To win in Vietnam, LBJ would let his own children die. That’s the logic of his situation.”

  “Wow,” Kathy said and lit a joint. The loose end of paper burned in an instant, sending a long gray ash floating down onto the arms covering my lap.

  “Right on,” Sandy said.

  “Oh God, Rafe,” Julie said, not a rebuke, but in pain at my scenario.

  “Why are you going to this elitist math program?” Sandy said. She sat down on a chair next to me. The towel split open across her left thigh up to her waist and I saw, shadowed by the terry cloth umbrella above her groin, a small, thick bush of black hair. I jerked my head up sharply and looked into Sandy’s earnest, absolutely asexual glare of interest. “I mean, since you understand this pig system,” Sandy added, “why be part of it?”

  “Give him a break, Sandy,” Julie said.

  Kathy finally let out a small wisp of the smoke from her first toke and said in a choked voice, “Because he is a genius.”

  Her remark was almost as thrilling as Sandy’s opened towel. By then, I had absorbed the fact that I wasn’t a genius (at least I had enjoyed five years of believing my uncle’s delusion) and knew my fellow students were aware of this dangerous truth
. Maybe I could continue to fool people in areas other than mathematics: less objective disciplines, such as world politics. You could say 2 plus 2 equals 5 in politics and be considered brilliant, rather than someone who can’t add. Soon my uncle would learn from Dr. Jericho that I wasn’t a prize pupil. I had to compensate somehow.

  “I know he’s a genius,” Sandy said.

  Boy, this is easy, I thought and glanced at the widening canyon of her towel. I could now see all of her most private region, including the resumption of white skin above. What was in that forest? my whole body wanted to know. I knew how to touch it, I knew what it meant to Sandy, but what would it mean to me? Something extraordinary, I was sure, a place where lies and secrets had no more use, where the truth was no longer a danger.

  “But you have a responsibility to use your big brain,” Sandy went on, “to help people. We’re organizing branches of SDS in all the high schools and you should be in the vanguard in your school. You could really educate others.”

  They all pitched into this topic, discussing among themselves whether I should radicalize my high school peers or the geniuses at Columbia. “Why not both?” Sandy said. But she agreed with Kathy and Julie that, if I could get the prodigies to denounce Columbia’s gym construction, it would really help the cause. And cost me an inheritance of between two and three hundred million dollars, I thought.

  “They wouldn’t do it,” I told the women. Each of them had a toke of the joint by now and Sandy, who, unfortunately, had rearranged her towel so my view was ruined, turned her hand toward me—the gesture of Michelangelo’s God offering life to Adam—only she was offering my first taste of an illicit drug.