Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil (59 page)

Gene nodded, a mute concession that he had tried to cover up. “Okay,” he sighed, his lips pursing before he elaborated further. When he did, he gave the words as much dignity and solemnity as possible. “This time she didn’t use a condom when she gave me …” he gestured to his groin and then shrugged.

I was amused. Copley intoxicated Gene with fables of the future and escaped without spending a nickel. Gene repeated them to a prostitute and got better, if possibly more dangerous, service. Gene, emboldened by his new phallic stature (although at least one was a phantom), demanded that his wife pay more attention to his needs and she agreed. It was as if I were viewing some sort of ego-feeding chain. I had to hand it to Stick—he was a great salesman.

“What did Cathy say when you—well, what did you say to her exactly?”

“After Pete was in bed I brought her a cup of coffee in the living room and said I had to talk to her. No whining. I just said, very calmly, that I was unhappy she didn’t ever want to make love to me, that she only did it when I asked her to, and then only after I asked a lot. I told her I wanted that to change or I would have to assume she doesn’t want to be married to me.”

“Did you tell her about asking for the raise?”

“No, I didn’t want to confuse things.”

“How about the next day or the day after that? This was three days ago, right?”

“Well, after I made my speech, I left the room. We didn’t talk in the morning and when I came home Pete was there. After I put him in bed, I went right to my desk and worked. Cathy came in eventually, and she was crying. Or she had been. She apologized, said she knew she was being mean to me. She said when she heard Stick talking at the barbecue to the others about how hard I had worked on Flash II, how I had saved their ass on the debugging with the whole future of the company on the line if I didn’t get it done right, she realized how much pressure I had been under and she felt bad. She said that she knew there was something wrong with her, that she was too tired all the time and she was going to change. So then we made love …”

“You made love that night?”

“Yeah,” Gene said. He had been quite serious. Now he grinned. “This asking for what I want works. I’m telling you, you should write a book and we’ll go on
Donahue.”

Maybe Stick should write the book, I thought to myself. Certainly he should be the one to promote it on
Donahue.
“And after making love?”

“I fell asleep. Last night I had to work late at the office. We really haven’t had a chance—” he cut himself off. “Anyway, I don’t have to tell her. She was really impressed by Stick. She hadn’t spent much time with him before the barbecue. She told me she was wrong to have fought me about moving here. She said he’s going places and I was right to follow him. Look, he’s confided in me. If he asked them to give me a raise, not just a raise, but to double my salary, it would blow the plan. That’s not in my best interest.”

“How about a gesture of good faith?” I asked.

“What?” Gene frowned.

“Well, surely he could budget you a fifteen percent raise without having to justify it by admitting to the pushed-up schedule for Dragon? And fifteen percent would do you some good. That would be seventy-five hundred extra. Cathy might be able to get a little more help, especially if you’re going to be on a sixteen-hour-a-day work schedule for the next six months. It might free her up to return to school or something else that interests her. Now that she’s more aware of her own unhappiness, she might be willing to improve her life.”

For a while, Gene sat still, staring blindly at my book shelves. He slid the fingers of both hands together and I tensed, anticipating the crack of his knuckles. He slid them in and out several times, finally locked them, and twisted his hands outward; as usual, the popping noise of bone against cartilage made me feel queasy.

“You know, that’s going to be a problem,” he said.

“What?”

“I’m not going to be able to come here as … Well, maybe I could get here once a week.”

“How about asking for a fifteen percent raise, Gene?”

“What’s the point?” He sounded aggrieved. “It’s only six months and then I’ll be golden.”

“The worst that can happen is he’ll say no. Praise is exciting, Gene. It feeds the ego. But the body will starve all the same.”

Gene sucked in his cheeks, held his breath for a moment, then exhaled explosively. “You’re right,” followed this wind. “Okay. I’ll ask.”

“As for the sessions, I don’t know what we can do. You can talk to me by phone if that makes it easier—”

“No!” Gene objected with a touch of horror.

I raised my brows.

“I can’t risk them overhearing at work.”

“I could try to find time in the evening—”

“No, I’ll be working nights. I just—I don’t know. I may have to stop coming.”

I was suspicious. To be sure, Gene had, at long last, confronted his wife with his true feelings and he had asked Stick for his due, but what I saw happening would allow both breakthroughs to be resealed. He was unlikely to improve on the intimacy of his marriage during the relentless work schedule ahead. His demand of passion from Cathy was a neurotic’s: I want you to love me now, only I’m not going to be around. True, he had made a request of Copley. What he got were future payoffs, while Stick got what he wanted from his project director right away. Even if Copley came up with a fifteen percent or a ten percent raise, Gene’s true situation wouldn’t have changed much. Not that I thought Stick’s promises were lies. Why should I doubt them? If Black Dragon catapulted him to CEO of Minotaur, why wouldn’t he promote Gene, a loyal and successful player on his team? That was no favor; that was, as my uncle would say, good business.

Our time was up and Gene seemed in no mood to be decisive about our schedule. He said we could meet again this week and probably next as well. I promised to look at my hours and find alternatives.

I went home eager to tell Diane about the session. She enjoyed hearing the details of my work with Gene because he was an anomaly in my practice, a break, for both of us, from the harsh stories of the children.

I’m ashamed to admit that I mocked Gene and his woes. Diane had moved into my apartment two months before and I found her in the tub, covered with bubble bath, her young face, eyeglasses off, child-like as it floated, bodiless, on a sea of white foam. “I want sex and I want you to want sex or I’m leaving you,” I said as I entered.

Diane lowered her mouth to blow a puff of bubbles in my direction. “Okay, big boy, come and
get
me.”

“Oh
I
wasn’t talking. That was my patient talking to his wife.”

“No kidding!” Diane sat up all the way. I watched the foam slowly evaporate to reveal her neck and the rise of her breasts. “Tell me everything!”

After my report, we made love, sliding on the porcelain to the sizzle of popping bubbles. Our mood was silly and full of confidence. “Call me Tawny,” Diane whispered as she pulled me in.

C
HAPTER
E
LEVEN
Debugging

S
TICK FOUND MONEY IN THE BUDGET TO GIVE
G
ENE A FIVE PERCENT RAISE
, and the intramural race between machines went on. Since Gene couldn’t fit our sessions into his intensive schedule, we talked on the phone for a half hour once a week, Wednesdays at twelve o’clock. He called from a quiet booth at an International House of Pancakes five minutes from Minotaur; if he were spotted it would seem that he had taken a break from a quick lunch to call home. Cathy hired a woman to pick up Pete after school, do light cleaning and some shopping. She enrolled in SUNY at Purchase to
get
her Bachelor of Science degree, postponing until graduation the issue of whether she would pursue medicine.

Two months into this schedule, Gene missed a phone appointment. He called the following morning to explain that a crisis had developed suddenly. His voice was hoarse, exhausted; he sounded harassed. He said he was working round the clock and wasn’t sure if he could promise to be available on Wednesdays.

“Do you want to skip it for a while, Gene? You don’t have to break it to me gently. I can take it, you know.”

He sighed loudly. “Yeah, I got nothing to talk about except the machine. When it’s done, we can go back to our regular schedule. I’ll need it. I’ve forgotten what people are like, much less how to talk to them.”

I did hear from Gene once more before the machine was finished, in August of 1989. Assuming I understood his explanation correctly, the late delivery of a key component for Black Dragon had delayed the prototype as well as the debugging process. The latter, in the case of a new machine, is a rechecking of the parts or wiring of the hardware to find what’s causing the prototype to fail. Debugging was Gene’s primary responsibility. He described the work as long, dull and meticulous. Although it requires few advanced computer skills, this purely practical task is, in a sense, more crucial than the imaginative brilliance of original design. The idea might be flawless, but how could you know until you had reviewed every minute connection, every tiny component?

Gene added, as an afterthought, that the rival machine was dead; indeed, Stick’s rival had been fired. “You don’t sound happy,” I commented.

“Well, it’s all fine provided I can debug Black Dragon so the damn thing works.” There was fear in his tone, real fear, not simply tension. I understood his investment in this work much more—hearing that quavering, scared sound—than from all our nostalgic conversations about the pressure and triumph of building Flash II. The machine was his real life: he gave all his passion to it, and loved his creation with an unguarded and reckless heart.

I was impressed, a little concerned, but not alarmed. I expected him to succeed, and if not, I felt confident I could help him adjust. Besides, soon I had my own crisis at work, as threatening and profound as any I had faced, a challenge that led me to doubt the value of my work with children and whether my creation, the clinic, had a right to exist.

The beginning was innocent enough. A colleague at Webster University, Phil Samuel, asked us to supply him with tapes of our first few interviews with young children (six and under) who were victims of sexual and physical abuse. He promised merely to view them for his own guidance, make no copies, and return them promptly. Why? I asked, reluctant to release these sensitive videos. Samuel had recently finished a clinical study, which he offered to send me before its publication, that showed young children are extremely susceptible to suggestion. Indeed, they proved to be vulnerable to an interrogation so gentle and unobtrusive that it hardly qualifies as suggestion. The study’s design was admirable. Two graduate students conducted private interviews with eight children. They were asked a series of questions about routine experiences, such as, “Have you been to the beach?” Among the banalities was a ringer. “Were you ever bitten by a mouse?” was asked in a neutral tone. At first, all the children said no. The interviewers didn’t react, didn’t repeat the query, and didn’t follow up. A week later, the same questions were asked of the same children. This time, half changed their answer, agreeing they had been bitten by a mouse. The follow-ups were neutral and bland. “Where were you when you were bitten?” “Did you have to go to a doctor?” Within three sessions, all had said yes and added a host of imaginative details. I was skeptical of his results—until I read the study and watched his videos.

I brought them to Diane. She brushed them off without looking. “This is the same old crap in a new disguise: Children can’t be believed. It’s the witch hunt defense.”

I insisted she watch the videos on a Sunday. We sat together as child after child, without any intimidation or insistence on the part of the questioner, invented complicated stories of events that never happened. One boy’s fabrication was particularly vivid. He said he had gone into the cellar with his older brother, they had fought over an action figure until his brother pushed him into a pile of old clothes. Hidden in the pile was a mouse who bit his right index finger. He was taken to the hospital, bandaged, given an injection and sent home. His father put out traps, the mouse was killed, buried in the backyard and, in a final twist of justice, his brother was punished for shoving him. After the fantasy was in full bloom, the boy’s father was instructed to tell him that, as far as he knew, there had never been a mouse, a visit to the hospital and so on. The boy freely admitted the story was just pretend. The father told him that was okay, no one would mind, and he could tell the truth in the future.

At the next interview, the graduate student informed the boy he knew his father had talked to him, knew the events were false and that he could say so without fear of a scolding. The boy refused to recant. He insisted vehemently that every detail was true and proceeded to embellish further. In Samuel’s opinion, the more this boy was doubted, the deeper the imagined event was pushed across the border into reality. Fantasy had become traumatic memory.

“So? It’s just one kid,” Diane said.

I showed her the written data. All the children eventually provided descriptions of a biting mouse that never happened and, when challenged, were loath to abandon them. Yes, they were young enough to be genuinely confused about the difference between fantasy and reality; nevertheless, they qualified for testimony in court. (The significance of their ages in terms of giving evidence is far from academic. In the courts, children six and under had been considered to be the most reliable witnesses of abuse, presumably because they were too ignorant of sex to make it up. I had sworn that was my expert opinion to more than a dozen juries, without allowing for a smidgen of doubt.)

While she read on, I left to make coffee. When I returned, Diane had rewound the tape to watch key moments again and again, looking, I knew, for some mistake in the tone of the question asked at the first interviews: “Were you ever bitten by a mouse?” The question was asked as casually as possible. And the first response was equally casual—a simple no. The next week, sometimes a hesitation, sometimes an assent; yet by the third week, all nodded their cute little heads to say solemnly in a wounded tone, “Yes.”