Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil

by Rafael Yglesias

  Halston did nothing. He waited until it was over, then handed me a box of tissues. I blew my nose. I felt looser, less fragile. I put the wad of paper in an empty wastebasket. It was as heavy and as black as his glasses.

  “Is not being a genius one of your secrets?” he asked when I returned to my chair.

  “You bet, Doc.”

  “I’d prefer it if you didn’t call me Doc.”

  “Sorry.”

  “But you can if you want. I’m not a parent or a principal. You don’t have to obey me.”

  I didn’t believe him so I said nothing. I had given up lying. It was the truth or silence.

  “Is not being a genius a secret from everyone?”

  “Yep.”

  “But especially from certain people?”

  “Yep.”

  “Especially from your uncle?”

  “Bingo.”

  “What would happen if he found out you aren’t a genius?”

  I thought that through. I had a lot of choices. I picked the one I believed would most impress him. “It would cost me two hundred million dollars.”

  “Well, that’s a good reason to keep it secret.”

  “I’ll say.”

  “Any other reason?”

  “He wouldn’t love me anymore.”

  Halston nodded. “Which reason is more important?”

  “Important?”

  “What are you more frightened of, losing his money or his love?”

  I said nothing.

  “Is that a secret too?”

  “Everything is a secret.”

  “Well, I already know the big one, right?”

  I said nothing.

  “I see. I don’t know the big secret. All right. But it’s an important secret, right?”

  I nodded.

  “So, you’ve already decided to test me, why not make it a thorough test?”

  “I want to go home,” I said.

  “We have another five minutes. That’s what we’re going to do, spend an hour talking every day, provided you continue to be willing to be well. You’ll come here after school and you’ll test me. You’ll see whether, as you go back to living your life, anybody gets wind of your secrets from me. But you have to keep telling me or you won’t be testing me and also you won’t get well.”

  I nodded.

  “So, for today, one last question. What bothers you more, losing your uncle’s money or his love?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Guess.”

  “Guess?”

  “Take a guess. It’s not a test. There’s no right or wrong answer.”

  “Sure there is.”

  “Yes? What’s the right answer?”

  “His love.”

  “Then I would suppose your answer is the money.”

  I smiled. Halston smiled back. He glanced at the clock on his desk. “Okay. I’m going to let you go and call your uncle in here to tell him about your seeing me every afternoon. He’ll ask me what’s wrong and I’ll tell him you had a panic attack, that as long as you and I can talk freely without him butting in, you’ll be all right. He won’t like that, but he’ll accept it. Remember Rafe, what we say here belongs to us. I don’t want you telling people my secrets either. Understood?”

  I nodded. He stood up. I did too.

  “I like you, Rafe,” he said. “I’m going to enjoy our talks.”

  Uncle spent thirty minutes with him. A long, long time it seemed to me. Halston had probably cracked, giving in to whatever Bernie might demand. But the look on Uncle’s face as he emerged was too confused and harassed for that to have happened. And he dropped the false tenderness, treating me with the real anger I knew he felt. “Come on,” he said. “He says you can walk without help.”

  I tried skipping—not too obviously—to the car. Bugs Bunny’s voice helped me talk; why not hop like him? Bernie glanced at my strange movements, but they were quick, so he didn’t complain. In the car, Bernie grumbled, “He says you can go to school tomorrow.”

  I thought the doctor was crazy, but I said nothing.

  “And then you’ll go to him for an hour. We’ll do that every day, except the weekends, until you’re …” Bernie looked away. There was a long silence as we passed a shopping strip on Northern Boulevard. I forgot about Uncle and watched the world. I noticed things that I must have driven past hundreds of times without really looking. I spotted a Dairy Queen. I remembered how much I loved Brown Bonnets as a child—soft vanilla ice cream dipped in a hot chocolate sauce that instantly hardened into a molded shell. I wished I could have one now, but I would never dream of asking Uncle for something as pointless as ice cream.

  “Dr. Halston wants me to call Dr. Jericho and withdraw you from the Columbia group. He says that’s what you want.” Uncle shifted, leaned toward me. At the heart of his powerful features were eyes that looked wounded and confused. “Is that right? You don’t want to go anymore?”

  I didn’t answer. I wanted to go to Julie’s. And it bothered me that Halston had specifically excluded the “genius program” activity. Wasn’t that an indirect betrayal of the secret I had given him?

  Bernie looked away. “If you didn’t like Dr. Jericho and the others, why didn’t you just tell me? I don’t blame you. When I read the Times article I thought those kids sounded like creeps.”

  Another silence.

  “We’ll have to cancel your tennis lessons or move them to another time,” he said. “Cancel,” I said.

  “Oh, so you can talk.” He leaned back and grumbled, “I hope this isn’t a mistake.” After another long silence, he sighed and said, “I don’t want to spoil you like my kids.”

  I discovered something extraordinary the next day at school. I discovered that if I was silent through my classes, ate lunch alone, talked to no one during study hall or the movements from room to room, nobody minded. I found this so delightful I went to the bathroom to laugh about it in private. A couple of my teachers glanced in my direction when they asked their toughest questions and were puzzled not to see my hand up, but after a few such looks, they gave up. My friends—they were really jock teammates or nerd peers—spoke to me, asking whether I had been sick. I nodded, smiled, moved on, and no one remarked that I actually spent eight hours without saying a single word. It was hilarious to me. I hadn’t been crazy to think I didn’t exist. I really didn’t.

  I told Halston in a torrent of words. I detailed how I managed each encounter as a mute. In my excitement, I didn’t notice that my Bugs Bunny voice was gone. He listened, chin propped on his right hand, smiling as if he also thoroughly enjoyed the joke. “And even with your sitting and doing nothing,” he said, after my account was done, “nobody noticed you aren’t a genius.”

  There was something nasty about that remark. I couldn’t identify what. “Right,” I said and retracted into my protective silence.

  He waited patiently. When it was clear I would volunteer no more, he asked, “How did your uncle react to my conference with him?”

  I shrugged. “He doesn’t want me to be spoiled.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “He doesn’t want me to get lazy.”

  “What did you feel about that?”

  I shrugged.

  “Nothing? You didn’t think anything? Or is that another secret?”

  “No. I don’t remember.”

  “Try.”

  I waited. All I remembered was the Dairy Queen. “I wanted some ice cream.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Ice cream. I wanted a Brown Bonnet at the Dairy Queen.”

  “Un huh. What made you think of ice cream?”

  I thought he was being fairly stupid. This trying to keep me talking no matter how insipid the subject was silly. “I have no idea,” I said.

  “You sound angry.”

  “I’m not angry.”

  “When was the last time you had a …” he hesitated and gestured for me to help.

  “A Brown Bonnet?” I said. />
  “Yes. When was the last time you had a Brown Bonnet?”

  “You know,” I said without thinking, “you’re being pretty stupid.” I don’t recall if I brought my hand to my mouth, shocked at my rude if honest remark, but I certainly felt as if I should.

  “Well, I warned you. I’m not a genius. But you don’t have to be a genius to remember when was the last time you had a Brown—what was it? Derby?”

  I laughed. He really was a stupid man. “Bonnet,” I corrected him. “I used to have them when I was a kid. I guess the last time I had one was in Washington Heights.”

  “With your mother?”

  In the middle distance, appearing at the edge of his mahogany desk, I saw it: that hot, nauseating day in Tampa, my arm in a cast, my father flirting with the Dairy Queen employee, and the slow-motion fall of my Brown Bonnet, smashing on bleached concrete.

  “What are you thinking?” he asked, waking me from the trance of memory.

  “I broke my arm.” Halston nodded, almost as if he knew already. “I broke my arm in Tampa, visiting my grandparents. My father was away and when he came to get me at the hospital—” I caught myself. “Hospital? Was it a hospital?”

  “Maybe it was a hospital. You were leaving a kind of hospital with your uncle. Perhaps that’s why you remembered your father taking you from a hospital to buy you a Brown Hat.”

  I waved at the fog that had appeared, covering my vision of that day. I was forgetting something important. I tried to seize that image for examination, but it dissolved and I could remember nothing other than the chocolate shell shattering, ice cream oozing. I slapped my thigh. “I don’t remember.”

  “It’ll come,” Halston said. “So. We have only a little more time and you haven’t told me any secrets. What’s the big one? Why don’t we start at the top?”

  By now I was aware that he hadn’t been a fool to ask why I wanted a Brown Bonnet. I lurched from contempt for his intelligence to awe at his insight. He could not only read me when I lied, he could see things about me even I didn’t know. That was unique in my experience; and my ignorance of myself was also a revelation.

  “Well … ?” Halston asked. “Why don’t we get the big secret out of the way?”

  Maybe he could see through me, but maybe not. Maybe not to the darkest corner.

  Halston smiled. “Doesn’t have to be the big one. How about just any secret?”

  “I jerk off,” I said fast.

  He nodded, bored. “Often?”

  “At least once a day. Sometimes twice.”

  “Do you enjoy it?”

  I laughed.

  “Is that another stupid question?”

  I thought about it. “No,” I admitted.

  “Well?”

  “Usually. Sometimes, I don’t know … I feel …”

  “Dirty?”

  “No. Bored.”

  Now he was interested. “You masturbate when you’re bored or you’re bored by masturbating?”

  “Both,” I said.

  “Bored? Or lonely?”

  “I’m never lonely.”

  “You’re never lonely?”

  “I like being alone.”

  “I see. When you masturbate, whom do you think about?”

  I said nothing.

  “Is that a secret?”

  “I think about women.”

  “Women or girls?”

  “Women.”

  “Women you know?”

  “Uh huh.” I was excited. This was like a hide-and-seek game. Only I wasn’t sure if I was hiding from him or me. Whom did I really think about? The fantasies were a kaleidoscope of women, with only one pattern that was distressing—if my suspicion about the flash of that forbidden image was correct.

  “Such as?”

  I said nothing.

  “Did I tell your secret to anyone?”

  “No,” I said. I had decided removing me from Dr. Jericho’s program wasn’t really a betrayal. I wanted to complain about it anyway, but I didn’t, because I was also grateful.

  “Is it your aunt? Do you think about her?”

  I smiled, deeply amused by both the idea and the fact that Halston had made this guess.

  “I see, I’m wrong again. Why don’t you tell me? You know I’m not a genius. If we wait for me to guess right, it could take years.”

  “I think about my cousin sometimes.”

  “Your uncle’s daughter?”

  “No. My cousin Julie. She’s my uncle’s brother’s daughter.”

  “Also a first cousin?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that a secret? That you have fantasies about her?”

  “Sure.”

  “Okay. Our time’s up. I’ll see you tomorrow. If you remember anything about the ice cream, let me know then.” He smiled. “That’s your homework.”

  That night my uncle came home early for diner, a rare occurrence during the week. My aunt and I usually ate at different times, more to avoid each other than because of our schedules, so it was an exceptionally rare event for all three of us to eat together.

  I was feeling pretty good after my day at school and my talk with Halston. I saw the beauty and logic of his plan. It took less effort lying when there was at least one person to tell the truth to. Besides, I wasn’t really lying except by omission, thanks to the muteness. I also had an idea of what I could do to cure myself, thanks to what I thought was Halston’s pointed questions about my sexual fantasies. I was a virgin—that was my problem. I loved women and had done nothing about it. That would make anyone nuts.

  Claire, the middle-aged black woman who cooked and served me alone when there was no company, gave us a simple meal of lamb chops, asparagus, and mashed potatoes. When she left, Uncle asked, “How was school?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “I called Professor Jericho,” Uncle said. “He said he was disappointed, but he understood.”

  “Who’s that?” my aunt asked.

  Uncle glanced at her disdainfully. “You know who he is.”

  “No, I don’t.” She lifted an asparagus to her lips and bit off its tip.

  “You should.”

  There was a silence.

  Aunt took another bite, chewed it thoughtfully, sipped from her gold-rimmed water glass. I thought she had dropped the subject when she asked, “So. Who is he?”

  “God damn it,” Uncle said softly.

  “He’s the head of the program at Columbia I’ve been going to,” I said. That was so many words, spoken so normally, they both looked surprised.

  “Thank you,” she said. Aunt usually ignored me, but she was never mean when I did come into her vision. “Funny name for a professor. What does he teach?”

  “You really don’t remember,” my uncle said. It wasn’t a question. “My God, it was in the New York Times!” he said, as if that were something greater than reality itself.

  “Oh, yes,” Aunt smiled. “The genius program. You’re not going anymore?” she asked me, pleased by this news, although I didn’t feel her smugness was directed at me.

  “Halston doesn’t want him to go.” That happened to be true, but as far as Uncle knew, he was lying—he had been told it was my choice. “His schedule is too tight.”

  “Rafael works hard,” Aunt agreed.

  “Can I still visit Cousin Julie?” I asked. Uncle frowned. “She’s expecting me this weekend anyway.”

  “You’ve been staying with Julie?” Aunt asked.

  “This is ridiculous!” Uncle turned from Aunt and pushed his plate from him, although he had eaten little. “What is the point of this game? You think hurting him,” Uncle pointed to me with a sweeping gesture, the way a scantily clad model shows off a prize on a TV quiz show, “is a way to hurt me?”

  “Well, isn’t it?” Aunt asked. “I thought you loved Rafael. If I love someone, then when they’re hurt, so am I.”

  What a day for revelations. Aunt wants to hurt me; and apparently she’s been trying to do it all along. How
did I miss that?

  Uncle still had his arm extended toward me. He left it there and stared at his wife. “You admit it? You have the nerve to admit it.” He got up now. His round face was ominous, his voice husky.

  My aunt didn’t seem frightened, although I was, for her. “Admit what? I’m not trying to hurt Rafael. That’s something you made up. I was just saying that if someone hurts a person I love, then they’re hurting me. You didn’t seem to understand that basic fact of life.”

  As Dr. Halston might comment, it didn’t take a genius to know she was talking about their disinherited son.

  Bernie turned his back on the table, as if something had called to him. His face cleared of the threatening anger. He squinted into the darkened living room. I followed his eyes. The wall of leaded glass windows shimmered with dozens of small reddish circles, imitating their parent, the setting sun. He was looking for something else to do: prey to kill, a kingdom to conquer. I imagined that this was what sent him into the world to make millions; not the rigid logic of the materialism my parents believed ruled him, but his inability to win with the women in his life—my mother, his wife, perhaps even his mother, whom I never met. Women—they were the answer. Without their love, “chaos has come again.”

  “Rafe,” he said softly. “Come with me.”

  I looked at my aunt. She was dressed in a black turtleneck, covering the wrinkles there that had been smoothed off her face by a surgeon. Her dyed blonde hair was combed up and back, stiffly puffed off her scalp by more than six inches, a passive and slightly bizarre leonine appearance, although it was presumably fashionable. I felt sorry for her. Her pretense of indifference to her husband’s anger was unconvincing and pathetic.

  Uncle patted the side of my shoulder, urging his reluctant thoroughbred to his feet. “We don’t have a home here,” he said with the smooth, resonant music of his cello.

  Aunt raised her napkin to her lips and dabbed them. She ignored Bernie and looked boldly into my eyes. “God help you,” she said softly.

  “Come on,” Uncle tugged at me. I got up. He said to her, “You’re the one who needs to see a psychiatrist.”

  Embarrassed, I averted my eyes. Uncle turned me away and we walked out together. I heard Aunt laugh. A bitter sarcastic laugh, but full of real amusement nevertheless, not forced. “That’s beautiful,” she said to our backs, although not especially to us. She laughed again. Its mockery followed us through the house. I fancied I could still hear it long after we were shut up in Uncle’s study.