Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil (30 page)

Kathy guffawed. Sandy searched my eyes thoughtfully. I put the tip of my index finger on the point of her shoulder and slowly traced a line to her neck. Sandy turned her head and watched; so did Julie and Kathy. My fascination was complete: I felt as if I were scooping Sandy’s silken skin onto my finger, skimming off a drop of her to keep for myself. I came to and jerked my finger back. It happened in less than a second, but I was exposed in that moment, more so than Sandy would have been if her towel dropped.

“Sorry,” I said, abashed.

“What the hell for?” Sandy walked away. “Felt good,” she commented and left the kitchen, saying, “I’m late for the strike meeting.” She moved in a graceless waddle that I forgave her for instantly. I decided there was strength and honesty in her wide, flat-footed steps.

At that day’s group, I was so high from my two tokes that my team’s work, instead of being merely somewhat incomprehensible, was sheer gibberish. My inability to keep up with them showed me how little they relied on me under normal circumstances: no one complained about my silence and inactivity. In fact, they seemed to work faster. Without any help from me, they untied a knot that had frustrated us for two weeks. They whooped with joy and called Dr. Jericho to show off. He glanced at me (I discovered later my eyes were bloodshot) while they babbled to him. He congratulated them and pointedly asked to see me after the session.

I waited in my chair until all the geniuses were gone. Jericho turned a seat backwards, draped his arms on top of its backrest, and put his chin on his hands.

“How are you doing, Rafael?” he asked, pronouncing my name my least favorite way—RAY-FEE-EL.

“Okay.”

“You don’t seem happy.”

“Happy?” I grunted.

“Is it the group?”

“I’m happy.” The buzz was gone and my back ached. I was scared by this interrogation. What did he know? Had he talked to the other kids? Or to my uncle?

“Come on. Talk to me. I have eyes. I can see you’re not relating to the others. Is it the work in particular? Is it working in a group? Would you rather go off on your own?”

“No,” I said quickly. That would be a disaster; I’d have nowhere to hide. “I just—you know, I’m sluggish today. I haven’t been doing my best work,” I said, gathering belief in this lie. “I just haven’t been contributing and I’m embarrassed. But that happens with me, you know? Goes in cycles. I can’t do anything for weeks and suddenly I’m inspired.”

“Really?” He was interested. “So you’re used to having fallow periods.”

“I have to
get
frustrated, you know?” Maybe this was true, I hoped. Maybe I’m a temperamental genius.

“I’ll back off.” He held up the palm of his hand. “I’m sorry. Don’t want to interfere with the process. There’s no rush. We’re not on a timetable here.” He stood up. “Just come up with something brilliant by May,” he joked.

I went home resolved to become brilliant again. My self-deception didn’t last long. I tried to work on the next step in our group’s equation that night. I couldn’t; I had fantasies about my beloved trio—kissing Julie, who became Kathy’s breasts, and finally Sandy’s tempting forest. Relieving myself of sexual tension through self-abuse (which describes perfectly my attitude to self-love) didn’t improve my mental acuity. All week I was in a daze at school. I had been thrown out of gear. I noticed that my classes were not really demanding. I merely had to pay attention, discover my teachers’ pet prejudices in history or literature or science, and mirror them back, memorizing what they thought important and remembering long enough to pass that month’s test. Nothing truly difficult was demanded of us; no innovation, no inspiration, and certainly no genius. I was bright, of course. But so were many others who weren’t getting my grades. The difference was that I was trying so hard. I wasn’t dissipating my energy by charting the treacherous waters of adolescent courtship or rebelling against my parents (in fact, my academic single-mindedness
was
a rebellion against my dead mother and my exiled father). I was a fraud, I concluded. An above-average student and athlete running on high, easily outclassed when put up against real talent. Of course, I was precocious in general: my life experiences had been extraordinary and so I appeared wise. But, in the privacy of my head, I knew better. My wisdom was a combination of mimicry and an unpleasant awareness of how easily I could manipulate grown-ups through subtle forms of flattery. Thanks to my writer-father and the dreadful events of my childhood, I had read adult books. Long after Francisco’s banishment my taste in novels continued to be overly mature. I enjoyed Dickens, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Dreiser and the rest of the sad and powerful opus of world literary distress, not because I was smart, as others assumed, but because they helped me understand the turbulent world that had churned my life into an odd, confusing arrangement. As a by-product, I could behave beyond my years in social situations. The terrible thing, I realized gradually over that week, was that I didn’t know myself. In a very real sense to me, I didn’t exist at all. I was a creation of the needs and fantasies of my various caretakers.

During homeroom that sad week, I made a list of all the things I did: tennis, swimming, listening to classical music, chess, reading novels, math, science, history, writing, and so on. I stared at each one, vowing to put a check next to those activities I enjoyed doing for their own sake. Several times I checked one. I believe I did pick reading novels, science, and listening to music. (At least I should have.) But I erased them as I remembered how careful I was to let Uncle or my teachers know what books I read or what composers I liked. Everything was mixed with the vanity of a performance. What did I enjoy when there was no audience to applaud my taste?

I flipped over the sheet and angrily wrote the truth: masturbation, Oreo cookies, Coke, spare ribs, hot dogs with sauerkraut, naked women—and I stopped. I wrote: women. I wrote: breasts, vaginas, belly buttons, necks, eyes, earlobes, long hair, curly, black, blonde … I loved women. That was the answer. Appetite. Pleasures for my stomach and my penis. That’s what I was: a creature of desires, unsophisticated and certainly devoid of genius.

I tore up the sheet of paper, tore it up into pieces so tiny no one could ever reconstruct it. I buried the mass in my desk and looked at the students in my homeroom, some of them presumably my friends. Everything they knew and believed about me, no matter whether they liked or hated me, was false. Each day they took attendance, I claimed to be present, but I wasn’t really there—I was hardly in my own skin.

The world swayed. My skull cracked open. My mind seemed to be exiting my flesh, leaving this stranger to find a home in another world, with different choices of bodies to inhabit. It was terrifying: I felt the core of my being try to escape from me. I shut my eyes, gritted my teeth, and whispered over and over: “You’re real. You’re real. You’re real.”

I was going mad. I knew it suddenly. I shut up and hugged myself, eyes still closed. Strange, I reflected, that I hadn’t considered the likelihood before, given my mother. My uncle was the genius. My mother, my father and me, we were the bad seed the world thought we were, the envious weaklings of the earth who needed to be cared for by those who had genuine energy, conviction, and talent. The moral universe spun and spun in my head. I was so ill from the loss of self I couldn’t
get
out of my chair when the bell rang.

I watched the others rise and leave. I wished I could cry out: “Please help me. I want to be me but I can’t. I want to love you but I can’t. I want to be loved but I don’t know who I am.”

“Forgot something?” my homeroom teacher asked.

“I’m sick,” I said with perfect accuracy, for once.

C
HAPTER
T
EN
Reality Testing

T
HE FOLLOWING MORNING
I
WAS TAKEN TO
D
R.
H
ALSTON’S PRIVATE
office at Hillside Psychiatric Hospital. My uncle waited in the reception area. I had hardly moved or talked since the bolt of terror in my homeroom. I offered no explanation, not to the school nurse, my aunt or uncle. When asked, I would say in a whisper, “I don’t feel well. I can’t do anything right now.” Bernie drove me to Long Island Jewish and they discovered nothing physically wrong. It was immediately clear to the school nurse, my aunt and to the doctors—everyone except Bernie—that the problem was in my head. He fought against this conclusion until nightfall. His initial reaction of denial was understandable. Abruptly, without any apparent cause, his thoroughbred wouldn’t run; he wanted to believe the cause was a minor sprain, not the jockey and certainly not the demands of the race.

After the tests, I turned on the television in my room, lay on the bed and watched numbly, not speaking or eating the food they brought in on a tray. At some point I napped. I tried to keep my mind blank and my body still. Thoughts could crack my skin and then I would leak out; I felt movement might also do ghastly damage. When they forced me to walk—from the examination table to the car, for example—that took forever. I slid one foot forward, smiled mildly at my escorts so they wouldn’t be too annoyed as I paused, and after being sure nothing had dropped from me or spilled out, then slid my lagging foot to join the other.

Uncle asked, “What’s wrong?” over and over until he shouted at me, “Goddamn it, say something or I’ll break your head!” His fists were clenched and his face flushed. He scared himself and walked out. I was frightened by his obvious lack of tolerance for my weakness, but to go back to performing for him was so much more dangerous and terrible, that his annoyance at my passivity couldn’t shake me from it. He looked in during the evening several times after that outburst, glaring at me with rage, but said nothing, except on his last visit. “We’ll see Dr. Halston tomorrow,” he said. “He’ll help you. Don’t worry.” The language was caring, his tone impatient.

So there I was, facing my mother’s doctor. His thick black frames were the same he had worn seven years before, but his thinning blond hair was totally gone. Seeing him took me back to Ruth’s insanity, and confirmed that I was doomed, like her.

“Tell me, Rafe—They call you Rafe?”

I nodded, very gingerly.

“Tell me, what were you doing when you were in class—was it a class?”

“Home—” I paused so my voice wouldn’t shatter anything with too many syllables. “—room,” I finished.

“Homeroom. That’s not a class?”

I shook my head.

“Like a study hall?”

I nodded.

“Were you studying?”

“No,” I said and a laugh came, unbidden, out of me. That was scary.

“It’s okay to laugh,” Halston said. “I’m not a teacher. This isn’t the principal’s office. You haven’t done anything bad. You’re not here to be punished.”

I didn’t believe him.

He waited for a response. When none came, he said, “I know you’re very smart so I’m not going to pretend about what I’m doing. When someone has a mental illness—and maybe you do, I don’t know—like any doctor, I have to take your temperature, a blood sample, a few X-rays. Only there’s no way to do that when it comes to what goes on in our minds except by asking questions and the patient answering honestly.”

I said nothing.

“I can’t give you a medicine that will force you to be well. You have to want to be well. Do you want to be well?”

I nodded. I heard him but I tried not to use my intelligence at all. I stared at those thick glasses and wondered about them: were they plastic? They looked so strong I speculated they might be made of steel. But steel would be too heavy on his head. The weight might decapitate him.

“What you say here won’t be repeated.” He must have seen my look of contempt because he blanched. “You don’t believe me?”

I didn’t move at all.

Halston nodded at the closed door to his waiting room. “I promise you, on my oath as a doctor—and believe me, there’s nothing I treasure more than that—no one, including your uncle, will ever hear a word of what you tell me.”

I didn’t wish to think it through. The words—money can buy anything—flashed in my head. I was obliged to answer: “I don’t believe you.” Challenging him was less scary than using my brain.

Halston didn’t take offense, as I expected. He leaned back and ran a hand over his bald head. Must be nice, I thought, feeling a hard shell. “Is it because of me? Or would you not believe it about any doctor?”

“Nothing personal,” I said. I chewed up the words by keeping my lips tight. That worked well for me. My skin didn’t move as much and I could say more words with less effort. Unfortunately, I sounded like a cartoon character, or someone talking from inside a box.

“I see. Well, you must have some pretty terrible secrets.”

“I’ll say,” I said in my new goofy voice and laughed again. Too loud. Have to watch the laughter.

“I envy you.”

That surprised me.

“I don’t envy your feeling bad. But my life hasn’t been that interesting. Very little worth keeping secret.” He clapped his hands and rubbed them together as if finished with a job. “Well. I guess we’re stuck. I’m afraid that if you don’t want to be treated that means you’re sick and you’ll have to stay here. I hoped we could talk and you could go home. You could come here a few times a week to talk about these secrets—which would stay secrets—and go on with the things in life you enjoy.”

Oreos, masturbation, spare ribs.

“I’m always going to be honest with you,” he said. “I don’t want you to stay here. I don’t believe you’re really very sick. I don’t think you belong in a psychiatric hospital. I’m sure you have worries and problems. We all do, especially when we’re sixteen years old. But I think it’s a tragedy you want to be treated like a hopeless mental case. Don’t you?”

I shrugged. That wasn’t something I dared think through.

“Do you want to stay here?”

“No.”

“The only way to avoid it is to test me.”