Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil

by Rafael Yglesias

  “No, I can’t stop. That’s why I don’t want to see you, because I know I can’t stop. These last four months have been like death. I really feel—I mean really feel—like you stepped on my heart. I know, I know. In two years I’ll be laughing about you. But I won’t take the chance of you hurting me again. Fuck love.” She brushed away a flip of hair that wasn’t there. Her new style was straight back. She sighed. “I’m sorry. Okay,” she sighed. “What do you want?”

  “What is that color?” I asked. “What color?”

  “Your hair? That’s not a real color.”

  For a moment she stared. “Get the fuck out of here,” she said and stood up.

  I keened, head in my hands, and begged, “Don’t do this to me, please.” I was blubbering again. “Just let me talk. You’re my colleague, you’re my friend, you’re the only one—” I breathed fast to stop the tears and then took one sustained inhalation to make more words, “You’re the only one I can talk this out with. Okay? Susan can’t help me—she’s, she’s …”

  “Second-rate?” Diane said. “When did you find that out?” I looked up, wiping my eyes. Diane had sat down again, only sideways, her legs over the armrest. She muttered to the window, “Listen to me. Now I’m pissed off at poor Susan. She did her best with you. You’re just a hard case. A hard-ass motherfucker who has the gall to come in here and cry.” She turned to me. “Where do you get off crying?”

  “You won’t help me,” I said.

  She swung her legs to the floor and slapped her newly skinny thigh. “Help you with what!”

  “I’ve met two people who are sick.” I took a breath, relaxing a little as I began my report. Talking would help. “One of them is at ease only if he’s putting people under stress. He promises rewards for loyalty and sacrifice, finds a weakness, and when the person is no longer useful, even if they’re not a real threat, he hurts them as badly as he can. He tries to break anyone he can unless they’re totally passive—”

  Diane, nodding wearily as if she were bored, interrupted, “It’s called sadism. What is this? A quiz?”

  “Right. He’s a sadist. A psychological sadist. Nothing overt. Nothing illegal. He’s not a crude torturer—he doesn’t use his fists, or his cock, or a belt. Every family member has been affected. His son was goaded into a thinly disguised suicide. His wife is alcoholic. His daughter is—”

  Diane interrupted, “A sexless, passive—”

  I stopped her. “No.”

  “Okay, she’s a prostitute. She’s a drug addict who flicks abusive men. Do I get the dishwasher and the trip to Hawaii?”

  “No. She’s a narcissist. She’s strong. She has great inner strength. So she found a defense against him by murdering her real self before he could. She’s become a heartless mirage. She transforms herself into a dream figure for every man she encounters who seems worth the trouble to have them fall in love with her. She wins them like trophies and presents them to Daddy in a bizarre symbolic act of incest.”

  Diane smirked. “Was she foolish enough to go after you?”

  I nodded. “She even bothered to pretend to have bought my book on incest and read it years ago—”

  “Is that an assumption? Your book was a bestseller.”

  “Not an assumption. I fell for it at first. But later, I had a moment alone to check. On the back page I saw the remnant of a new sticker from a second-hand bookstore.”

  “Which one?”

  “The Strand.”

  “Kind of ironic, no?”

  “Ironic?” I asked.

  “We used to go there. Remember, Rafe? On Sundays we’d have bagels in bed and walk in the Village?” Diane turned her head and frowned at the door. “So how was she? A true narcissist should be a great lover—at least in the beginning. Totally devoted to your pleasure, huh? Must have been the blowjob of your life.”

  I didn’t answer. I couldn’t admit what I had done, that I had played an unscrupulous trick to confirm my diagnosis. Diane, of all people, would have had reason to be appalled.

  “That good, eh?” Diane got up, walked to her desk, and opened a drawer. “Okay, here’s your moment of triumph.” She came out with a pack of Camel Lights, removing one and lighting it. “Yes, you’ve got me smoking again. You not only broke my heart, you’ve got my lungs.” She took a long drag. “The worst thing is, you can’t smoke anywhere in this fucking self-righteous world. Every asshole on earth thinks they have the right to live forever.” She exhaled a foul cloud toward me. “God. I had an interview with Lisa Dorfman’s father—a court-ordered interview to determine if he was rehabilitated enough to have visitation. Remember what he did to her? Fucked her up the ass in front of her baby sister and then put her in a tub of scalding water? So I light up a cigarette and Mr. Dorfman asks me to put it out. Second-hand smoke is dangerous, he says, I’m putting his health at risk. I should have put it out in his eye.” She took another drag, lids shutting halfway with pleasure. “What do you want?” she asked and exhaled another cloud.

  “They’re happy.”

  “Who’s happy? Oh. You mean the sadist and the narcissist? You know that would make a good name for a heavy metal group.” She picked up a square glass ashtray, returned to the chair, and balanced the ashtray on her knee. She tapped it with her cigarette. “They’re happy? What do you mean—happy ?”

  “I mean, they have all the symptoms of their diseases, except one. They’re not unhappy. They function well. They don’t mind the emptiness of their emotional lives. They see everyone else as weak. They are content. They are in homeostasis.”

  “God bless us, every one,” Diane said, taking another drag. She squinted at the window, chin up, and blew out a long thin stream. “So? Mazel tov, they’re happy. Who are they, anyway? How do you know them?”

  “The narcissist is Halley.”

  Diane shook her head, bewildered. “Halley?”

  “My former patient, Gene Kenny? She’s the woman he left his wife for. And the sadist, her father, was his boss.”

  “Was his boss?”

  “You don’t know,” I said, realizing my mistake. “It was after we split up.”

  “Split up? Is that how you think of it? Jesus Christ. That’s a masterpiece of understatement.” She pressed her cigarette out. “Wait a minute.” She twisted and tried to slide the ashtray onto her desk. “What the hell—” she couldn’t reach, so she stood up to put it there while talking, “—are you doing? Making contact with a patient’s—?”

  “He’s dead,” I said. “He killed his wife and committed suicide two months ago.”

  Diane sat on the edge of her desk. She gaped at me. “No.”

  “Halley dumped him. Copley, her father, fired him two weeks later. His wife was threatening to move out of state with their son. He had no job and lost their one asset, the house. Well, Gene didn’t know the house was gone. I’m not sure exactly what happened, but …” I waved a hand in disgust. “That’s bullshit. I know exactly what happened. Copley and Halley had decided Gene was getting too big for his britches. He was asking for a piece of the company and he had the loyalty of the whole creative team. They had a new kid genius Copley thought could replace him. Between the two of them, they knew Gene’s situation, they knew how to make it as bad as possible, because just beating him down wasn’t enough. What if he went to a competitor? Although, that wasn’t it. What they did wasn’t practical—that wasn’t the real reason. What they did had the vicious irrationality of madness.” I was talking to myself, I realized. I tried to focus on Diane’s blank, still-amazed face. “That night, the night he murdered Cathy and killed himself, that was the night Gene realized how much they wanted to hurt him. Cathy confronted him with a letter calling in the loan on the house, exposing the fact that he’d been fired, that he had no way of stopping her from moving, and that he couldn’t meet the next support payments. In a flash he understood Halley was in a league with her father, he understood that for years his life had been an elaborate con game, that he had thrown a
way his marriage, his child, and his career for nothing. He was a fool as far as they were concerned, a ridiculous man. All his life he had lived in fear of making demands and pushed him past that fear. I cured him.” I laughed bitterly. Diane was staring at the carpet, kneading an eyebrow. “I told him if he asserted himself with his boss, he’d be rewarded for his years of service. I told him his fears that Halley didn’t love him were neurotic. I not only sent him into a battle he wasn’t fit for, worst of all, I stripped away his one puny defense, his tortoise shell. He was safe. Don’t you see? Diane, are you listening?” She looked up. “He wasn’t getting what he was worth at the company because he knew, instinctively, that kept him safe. He didn’t allow himself to fall in love with a beautiful, self-assured woman like Halley because he knew he couldn’t survive her rejection. He didn’t defy his wife because he knew he couldn’t survive her anger. He was miserable, sure. He was being taken advantage of, sure. But he was safe.”

  Diane pushed off from her desk. She returned to the chair, pulled her legs under her, and sat on her haunches. “It didn’t make sense to you, so you arranged to meet them, is that what happened?”

  “You’re wearing contacts,” I said. “That’s why you look so different.”

  “Yes! Yes, you got it. I’m on the prowl. I want everything to be different. I don’t want anything to remind me of you. Not even when I look in the mirror.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah, yeah, you’re real sorry. What do you want me to say? That you’re responsible for Gene’s suicide? That you shouldn’t cure neurotics because maybe their illness protects them?”

  “Yes. Say that, if that’s what you think it means.”

  “Jesus,” Diane whispered to herself. “This is your insane perfectionism. Your God-complex.”

  “Are you saying you don’t think what I’ve discovered is true? Copley and his daughter are mentally ill. If you believe the DSM III, if you believe everybody from Jesus to Freud to Phil Donahue, these people are sick. They should be miserable, they should be—”

  Diane kicked out her legs and stood up. “They’re mean. That’s all. They’re shitty people. Deal with it. Grow up.” She waved at the door. “Go!” I didn’t move. She stamped her foot. “I can’t believe you came here to talk to me about this crap! That can’t be why you’re here. I don’t think this is my vanity talking. You can’t be here to talk about these creeps.”

  “Diane! Goddamnit! Listen to me!” She backed away, startled. Had I yelled that loudly? I was on my feet, I realized, and I was advancing on her. I swallowed, took a breath and also stepped away from her. I made an effort to speak calmly. “You have a first-rate mind. Use it. Reach for something bigger than just mechanistic technique.” She breathed through her nostrils, her arms crossed protectively; but her eyes were waiting, prepared to listen. So I continued, “We divide the world into two groups—the well-adjusted and the dysfunctional. These people aren’t serial killers. They’re not sociopaths. On the contrary, they honor society and society honors them. They are well-adjusted but they have none of the healthy relationships that all the theorists maintain are the basis of being well-adjusted. No real love to sustain them, no true intimacy. And yet they function. They function at a high level. What do we call their psychological condition? We don’t have a category for it.”

  Diane’s shoulders slumped. Her arms uncrossed and drooped. She shut her eyes. “Sure we do.”

  “We do?” I was encouraged. Her tired voice meant she was taking me seriously.

  Diane leaned against her desk and rubbed her eyes. I whispered, “Are you going to tell me?”

  She uncovered her eyes. They were red and she looked at me hopelessly. Despite the forceful words, her voice was enervated. “I’ll tell you, if you promise you won’t debate it. That after you hear what I think, whether you agree or not, you’ll get the fuck out of my office, you’ll get the fuck out of my clinic, and you’ll get the fuck out of my life.”

  So that was the price. I didn’t understand her equation. And I didn’t care, as long as I got to hear its sum. “I promise.”

  “This is really what I think. Ph.D. and all.”

  “Okay.” I felt profoundly relieved. No matter what she said, I would have something, something I could take with me. Something to discard or accept—that didn’t matter—I would have something to anchor me again to the world.

  Diane said, “We’ve had a word for it from the beginning of human history. What you’re describing—these self-serving, heartless, destructive and perfectly respectable people—they’re evil. And there’s not a goddamn thing we can do about them.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Banality of Evil

  STICK PROVIDED THE ANSWER. I DISAPPEARED FROM MINOTAUR FOR three days, leaving a message with Laura that I couldn’t make the tennis date, offering no explanation. I retreated to Baltimore. From there, I checked on Pete Kenny, who, according to David Cox, the child psychologist in Arizona, was doing better than expected.

  “Perhaps he’s strong,” I said.

  “Well, I guess that’s part of it …” Cox reacted to my comment doubtfully. “He’s getting a lot out of the sessions. He’s articulate about his feelings, about how much he misses his Mommy and Daddy. Also, his grandmother is very loving. Not smart, but loving.”

  “He needs inner strength,” I insisted. “He needs your help, of course, and he’s fortunate his grandmother is doing her job, but, in the end, unless he’s strong that won’t be enough.” I told him I would pay Pete’s bills even if he doubled him to four sessions a week and that he should continue to tell Grandma the therapy was free.

  For three days I focused on the new problem Diane’s remark had defined for me. She had used the word evil as a form of surrender: less a description than a pejorative; not a diagnosis, but a despairing judgment. She had been clever and helpful in not applying it to the obviously ill or sociopathic: serial killers, rapists, child abusers. She had been right to reserve evil for Stick and Halley, my sane, respectable and thoroughly legal twosome, as opposed to everybody’s favorite target for the appellation: monster tyrants of history. Hitler and Stalin are the prime examples of our century, although humanity has provided a constant supply, and our century has many more than merely that dynamic duo. But Hitler and Stalin, from all reports, were profoundly unhappy men. Only a willfully blind psychiatrist would declare them to have lived in homeostasis. There is a simple measurement that can be taken: Hitler and Stalin were less content and more paranoid as their power grew. Their appetites increased by what they fed on, craving more enemies and more killings to maintain the same level of comfort, rejecting opportunity after opportunity to preserve themselves and their power, destroying not only those who opposed them, but those who longed to help them. They were obviously ill. The question is, what do we call the hundreds, indeed hundreds of thousands of people, who obeyed fervently and worked passionately to help them? The Silent Majority? The Good Germans? Stalinists? Conformists? I don’t mean concentration camp guards or Bebe Rebozo. I don’t mean those who did wrong and looked the other way for the base purpose of gain or survival. I mean those who were happy to live in an unjust world, who function as well under Hitler as they do under Bill Clinton.

  The presence of harmful function without anxiety or disorder, without stress on personality or mood—to call that psychological condition evil is not merely a judgment. It is a clear description and supplies the missing piece to a puzzle of psychology. Many practitioners have noted that it isn’t unusual for a patient to emerge from therapy as a less likable person. That’s a hint there is such a thing as too successful an adaptation to emotional conflict. Freud’s essential view of human beings (and this, more than anything, is what provokes so much hostility to him) is that we are savage animals who require at least sublimation, if not repression, to prevent our unconscious desires from having sway. In his view, social adaptation restrains us from our true desires: to rip food from the mouths of our starving compa
nions, to rape our neighbors’ wives, to kill our fathers, to worship the moon with blood on our fangs, to live for the satiation of our animal appetites, relishing the moment-to-moment satisfaction of our mouths and genitalia. Sometimes the bondage of these unacceptable instincts causes neurotic conflict (and supplies Woody Allen with comedy): the wish to sleep with your mother appearing as a fear of elevators; the longing to eat your father’s flesh surfacing as a horror of clams on the half-shell. Freud’s many reinterpreters adopted a less harsh understanding of human nature, allowing for kinder and more altruistic ids. But they still posit emotional conflict as the cause of psychological dysfunction.

  That view of humanity is supposed to catch everyone, from Gene Kenny to Adolf Hitler, in the net of psychology. Not Stick and Halley Copley, however. They don’t appear on our radar because we don’t recognize their outline. They are not in conflict. The equation is one-sided: they don’t need love and victory, only victory; they don’t need peace and pleasure, only pleasure. Truly, this makes labeling them evil a definition, not a swear word to vent our disapproval.

  But how to treat them? They would not volunteer and society does not see them as ill. Indeed, their absence of conflict, their freedom from neurosis, makes them attractive, drawing nervous moths to immolation in their brilliant fire.

  Frankly, I was stuck. I became desperate enough by the third day that, while idly going over the new chapters prepared by Amy Glickstein on Joseph’s experimental neuroleptic drugs, I considered spiking Halley’s Evian or Copley’s herbal tea (he had recently given up caffeine) with a psychotropic. Perhaps an antidepressant would heighten their unnaturally low levels of anxiety. Perhaps drugging this natural Prozac pair with Prozac would push their legal acts of self-preservation into a murderous mania. Unfortunately, then I would be a poisoner, not a healer. I wouldn’t have proved they suffered from a psychological condition susceptible to cure, any more than I believed Joseph had cured depression by chemical manipulation.