Rafael Yglesias - Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil

“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.

STICK FOUND MONEY IN THE BUDGET TO GIVE GENE 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.