Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil

by Rafael Yglesias

  “It’s too bright,” she said faintly. “Turn them off.”

  I left them on, of course. I hurried to the tub and reached into the water to pull her arms out. The wrists were untouched. She complained, “I don’t want to get out,” as I lifted her to make sure the rest of her was okay.

  “Keep your head back,” I said and went into the bedroom to make two calls, the first for an ambulance and another to Stefan Weinstein, asking him to meet us at Bellevue to admit her.

  “Is she a suicide?” he asked.

  I considered explaining that she was in no mortal danger, that technically this was self-mutilation, not suicide, but I didn’t. I answered, “Yes.”

  “Don’t be angry,” she said when I reentered the bathroom.

  “I’m not angry,” I said as I searched the cabinet for gauze, Band-Aids—anything. It was empty. The wastebasket under the sink was also empty; she hadn’t dumped anything there. I pulled two white hand towels from the rack and applied them to the cuts.

  “Ow!” she complained and fought me, shaking her head.

  “Stop!” I yelled. “They’ll bleed more.”

  “It hurts!” she whined.

  “Lie still. Put your head back.” I held the towels firmly, more concerned about stopping the flow than infection. The blood immediately soaked through in lines matching the cuts and began to spread. “When did you do this?”

  She rested her head on the sloping porcelain and looked at me. I didn’t need a medical degree to see in her blank eyes that she was in shock. She whispered to me, “Now I’m safe.”

  “You’ll be fine,” I reassured her.

  She tried to smile, but the cuts and the pressure of the towels made it more of a grimace. “No,” she told me. “You’re stupid.”

  “When did you do this, Halley?”

  She shut her eyes. Her chin slackened, her lips parted. She seemed to have passed out. But she hadn’t. She whispered, “Now we’re both safe.”

  Postscript

  POINTS OF TECHNICAL INTEREST

  I DON’T HAVE AS MUCH TIME TO COMPLETE THIS MANUSCRIPT AS I WOULD like. An urgent case calls me away from the evenings I have devoted to writing it. However, given the dangers in the crude techniques I worked out for Theodore and Halley Copley, I wanted to be sure to provide a rough record before continuing my research into what I’ve somewhat whimsically labeled Evil Disorder.

  Obviously, the ending with Halley was not a desirable one. The misfortune that the final crisis was provoked by an outside source, namely her encounter with Julie, was handled poorly. I was precipitate in landing the blow that everything we shared was fake; that I was not a loving incestuous Daddy, but merely a mirror; a mirror that, like her false reflections, provided an addictive fantasy. The success of the trauma therapy with Stick at the pond had misled me. I should have taken into account that Halley’s disorder, despite the superficial appearance of an attack on others, was always self-directed, a series of self-murders. To block her meant she would turn entirely against herself and not, as Stick had, against me. The pale, almost invisible scars she bears today on her face, following two rounds of reconstructive surgery, and the deeper scars she bears forever within, are my fault and my responsibility. The promise I made to myself after Gene’s death, to write a book of my failures, has been kept. Despite the success with Stick, and the fact that Halley is no longer a danger to others, I can hardly point to her as a triumph.

  Stefan Weinstein treated Halley during the thirty-day stay at Bellevue for observation. He was waiting at the emergency entrance when we arrived in the ambulance. He stayed with me during her surgery. I was frightened. Stefan insisted I take a sedative and I agreed. Considering both our prejudices against drugs, that proves I was in a bad state. My guilt, and the full realization of what I had lost, unnerved me so much I told him the details of my dealings with Halley. (I don’t regret having taken the risk of admitting my manipulative behavior and not because it proved to be no risk. It helped him treat her effectively, and I owed poor Halley at least that.) I was not in immediate professional danger, since, as far as medical and legal ethics go, I was not treating her, and thus my actions couldn’t be labeled as malpractice. Stefan was angry and questioned my mental stability, which did imply a professional threat.

  I did not explain my motive or my logic. He knows nothing of why I played the role of an incestuous father. I went along with his assumption that I was suffering from a breakdown, caused by the stress of leaving the clinic and the shock of Gene’s death. Given Stefan’s bias as a traditional Freudian, I couldn’t inform him of my diagnosis of Halley; and certainly I couldn’t admit that my intention had been, in his terms, to make her neurotic—or, in my terms, to disrupt her successful adaptation as a narcissist. I agreed to see Dr. Richard Goodman, a psychiatrist he recommended, as a patient. Only a few sessions were required for me to convince Dr. Goodman that I had had an episode, an episode brought to an end by the shock of Halley’s mutilation and understood thanks to his analysis.

  The patient Stefan treated in Bellevue regressed to childhood. For weeks, Halley spoke with a little girl’s lisp and claimed not to recognize her mother and father when they visited. (There was a residual benefit to her psychosis. Stick felt responsible and his own desire for reform was reinforced.) I saw her only three times. After that, Stefan asked me not to visit. Although she showed no distress in my presence, chatting lucidly about Minotaur and Levin Entertainment, she would weep uncontrollably after I left. Stefan concluded that my visits were sustaining what I insisted was her delusion that I was her lover. (Of course, he didn’t agree that was a delusion. Again, one hand was tied behind my back in these arguments, since I couldn’t explain my reason for insisting we were not and had never been lovers.)

  Shortly after my last visit to Bellevue, I met with Stick and Mary Catharine to help them select a private psychiatric hospital for Halley to complete her recovery.

  The sober Mary Catharine was even more frank than the drunk. “I was a rotten mother,” she told me boldly. Stick kept his head down. “Soon as she started sprouting tits I wanted to kill her. And he was no help,” she nodded at her penitent husband. “Kept barging into her room without knocking hoping to get a peek.”

  He took me aside later and whispered, “I want you to know. I never touched her.”

  “I know that, Stick,” I said, almost feeling sorry enough to tell him the truth.

  “They say she keeps talking about Daddy touching her, but it’s not true.”

  “I’ve told them that, Stick. You don’t have to worry.”

  Almost two years have passed. Halley wrote four letters to me immediately after her release from Bellevue that I should append to this, although my personal things aren’t with me at the moment, and for safety’s sake, pending the outcome of my next case, I am filing this manuscript immediately in the Prager archives. Her letters won’t reveal much, but they meant a great deal to me. She wrote that I was the first man she truly loved and she added, poignantly, that now she knows how Gene must have felt. Today, Halley is back at work for Edgar. Their relationship, he tells me, and he’s trustworthy about such things, has been strictly professional since her release. He said her whole manner was changed when she returned to the job. She became cool, sometimes abrasive in her dealings. Just as effective, but much less popular. To avoid arousing Stefan, I have neither seen nor spoken with her since Bellevue.

  A month ago, Edgar reported that Halley is engaged to be married to a Pakistani, a resident in thoracic surgery at New York Hospital, who plans to practice in the States. Edgar added that today Halley is a devout Muslim and one of his most valued employees which proves, he joked, that peace in the Middle East will last.

  That last detail, her conversion to her fiancé’s religion, worried me sufficiently to ask whether Halley and her husband had made definite plans to be married. “Their plans are definite,” Edgar said. “I have an invitation to the wedding.” I was relieved. She might have acquired a fa
lse faith to woo her betrothed, but that is a quite normal form of self-murder for the sake of love. Stefan Weinstein is to be complimented in restoring Halley to stability, but some credit must be given to my treatment that she did not revert to her old, destructive self.

  As for my condition? I plead guilty that in my invention of a new treatment for Halley, I failed to protect myself. I loved her. But that wasn’t a destructive experience. Indeed, I believe I resolved my two most difficult and troubling conflicts. I can, at last, bring to fruition my construction of these case histories: in the expiation of my failure with Gene I found relief from the guilt of my betrayal of my father; in the impersonation of incest with Halley, I was able to forgive my mother. I loved my little girl just as my mother must have loved her little boy. That, of course, is not rational—but why should a cure make more sense than the illness?

  I married Diane six months ago. As I’m sure any professional would guess, she loves me today with complete confidence in my feelings for her. Since my “admission” to her and others that I had been suffering from an emotional crisis when I handed the tape to Phil Samuel, her sympathy hasn’t wavered. Absence may not make the heart grow fonder, but repentance certainly does. By the way, my repentance is perfectly sincere. Although Diane may not know everything I am doing these days, my commitment to her has no reservations. When I saw cousin Julie at this past Seder I couldn’t keep my eyes off her, but not for the old reason. I could no longer recognize why she had been, for so many years, the lost prize of my youth.

  Five months ago Diane accompanied me to Tampa to bury Pepín. They called me after messages left for my father at his number in Havana weren’t returned. A handful of senile or doddering relatives came to the service that I arranged. Baffled by Pepín’s atheism and embarrassed by the funeral director’s startled look when I informed him of Grandpa’s ir-religion, I arranged for a Methodist minister to speak. He babbled so much nonsense at the funeral home I told him to keep it short and sweet at the grave.

  Diane rode with me to the burial at the Centro Asturiano de Tampa Memorial Park Cemetery. It was over and we were walking back to the car when a taxi appeared and a tall, very thin, bald man got out. He was in a long white Cuban dress shirt, a guayabera, and his skin was so tanned, at a distance he might have been taken for a black. It was Francisco, of course. Diane and I waited for him to reach us. I noticed he limped. He stopped in front of me and demanded, “Is it over?”

  “We tried to reach you.”

  “I was in France,” he said, staring into my eyes. “Meeting with a publisher for a book on Fidel.” His eyes were set farther back than I remembered, sunken compared to his high cheeks. He swayed, as if he were dizzy. I put a hand on his shoulder. He peered past me toward the graves. “What happened?” he asked.

  “We just finished—”

  He cut me off. “How did he die?”

  “In his sleep. Heart failure. As peacefully as it could happen.”

  My father’s old face looked frightened for a moment. “Show me,” he said.

  I moved aside. He walked with me. The path was uneven. Because of his limp, he stumbled, and I put my arm through his. He clutched it tight against him, with all his old strength and command. He allowed me to guide him to his father’s grave.

  He stood and stared at the coffin without a flinch or a tear. After a long silence, he said, “A world is gone.”

  He didn’t talk in the car or argue at the hotel while I got him a room. He nodded in reply when I asked if he wanted something to eat. Diane said she’d go up to the room to take a nap. We went to the hotel coffee shop and Francisco ordered a hamburger. “They only know how to make them in the States,” he told me.

  He asked a few questions, whether Diane and I had children. “Not yet,” I told him.

  “I would like a grandson,” he said. “I don’t want you to be the last of the Nerudas.” I wasn’t sure if that was meant as a criticism.

  “You’re forgetting Cuco.”

  He shook his head. “He can’t have children. He had testicular cancer and the treatment made him sterile.”

  “Is he all right?”

  “Yes. The operation was done a year ago. He’s in complete remission. He’s made a fantastic recovery. But he couldn’t come with me. There’s … These days, in Cuba—” Embarrassed, Francisco waved away the beloved country’s woes. “He couldn’t take the time.”

  “Give him my love.”

  Francisco nodded. “He said to say hello.”

  “You plan to continue to live in Cuba?” I asked.

  “I will die there,” he said in his dramatic voice that could transform melodrama into a reasonable comment.

  “I have something to apologize for,” I said.

  He shut his eyes, irritated. “Not this.”

  “No,” I said and touched his thin arm. “You misunderstand. The last time I saw you, I told you I didn’t think I could change the world and it made you angry. You were right to be angry. I was wrong. I apologize.”

  Francisco sat up straight, his head back as if to gain perspective on me. “You can’t mean that,” he said finally.

  “I do. It’s wrong for a son to say that to his father. Whether or not I can change the world, for your sake I have to try.”

  He seemed embarrassed and he busied himself with the last french fry on his plate. In a moment I knew why. A tear rolled down my cheek. I wiped it away and soon he was telling me Fidel was going to survive despite the fact that he was utterly alone and at the mercy of the United States. I didn’t believe a word he said, but I listened happily to the music of his resonant voice. When he left the next morning, he embraced me at the airport and kissed Diane, telling her, “Give me a grandson,” so earnestly that she had to look away.

  I’ve tried to go over this text in the past few weeks. I know it requires revision and supplemental data, mostly to quell academic quibbles. Unfortunately, a recent visit to Albert prevents further work at the moment. Albert called and asked for my help two weeks ago. He has been benched by his coach in an effort to intimidate him into taking steroids and has gotten into other trouble thanks to a teammate. I believe I may have identified another example of Evil Disorder and will spend most of the next six months as an advisor to the football program.

  There are other points which ought to be covered, such as how I managed to form a “friendship” with Phil Samuel despite my marriage to Diane. Phil, it turns out, provides an interesting instance of this newly defined illness within my own profession. I must leave the bracketed portions—possible footnotes—and other loose ends untied until I have completed these investigations.

  During the past year, I have formed a company, Neruda Consulting, that advertises itself as a help to corporations who wish to adjust to the shifting demands of the modern business world. Edgar, believing this is some sort of magic cure for corporate healing such as I performed at Minotaur, has backed me financially and is, of course, an invaluable salesman of our service. During the past year, I have prepared a questionnaire for our clients to circulate among their employees. I will return to this manuscript after dealing with Albert’s nemesis and releasing the information I’ve gathered about Phil Samuel’s behavior toward his female graduate students. By then, I should have identified more cases and be able to proceed with refining my treatment for Evil Disorder. Diane understands that I feel I can no longer limit myself to working with children. I am forty-two years old and yet I feel my life has just begun. I look forward to expanding my new practice and I welcome other professionals to the cause.

  A Biography of Rafael Yglesias

  Rafael Yglesias (b. 1954) is a master American storyteller whose career began with the publication of his first novel at seventeen. Through four decades of writing, Yglesias has produced numerous highly acclaimed novels and screenplays, and his fiction is distinguished by its clear-eyed realism and keen insight into human behavior. His books range in style and scope from novels of ideas, psychological thrillers, an
d biting satires, to self-portraits and portraits of New York society.

  Yglesias was born and raised in Washington Heights, a working-class neighborhood in northern Manhattan. Both his parents were writers. His father, Jose, was the son of Cuban and Spanish parents and wrote articles for the New Yorker, the New York Times, and the Daily Worker, as well as novels. His mother, Helen, was the daughter of Yiddish-speaking Russian and Polish immigrants and worked as literary editor of the Nation. Rafael was educated mainly at public schools, but the Yglesiases did send him to the prestigious Horace Mann School for three years. Inspired by his parents’ burgeoning literary careers, Rafael left school in the tenth grade in order to finish his first book. The largely autobiographical Hide Fox, and All After (1972) is the story of a bright young student who drops out of private school against his parents’ wishes to pursue his artistic ambitions.

  Many of Yglesias’s subsequent novels would also draw heavily from his own life experiences. Yglesias wrote The Work Is Innocent (1976), a novel that candidly examines the pressures of youthful literary success, in his early twenties. Hot Properties (1986) follows the up-and-down fortunes of young literary upstarts drawn to New York’s entertainment and media worlds. In 1977, Yglesias married artist Margaret Joskow and the couple had two sons: Matthew, now a renowned political pundit and blogger, and Nicholas, a science-fiction writer. Yglesias’s experiences as a parent in Manhattan would help shape Only Children (1988), a novel about wealthy and ambitious new parents in the city. Margaret would later battle cancer, which she died from in 2004. Yglesias chronicled their relationship in the loving, honest, and unsparing A Happy Marriage (2009).

  After marrying Joskow, Ylgesias took nearly a decade away from writing novels to dedicate himself to family life. During this break from book-writing, Yglesias began producing screenplays. He would eventually have great success adapting his novel Fearless (1992), a story of trauma and recovery, into a critically acclaimed motion picture starring Jeff Bridges and Rosie Perez. Other notable screenplays and adaptations include From Hell, Les Misérables, and Death and the Maiden. He has collaborated with such directors as Roman Polanski and the Hughes brothers.