Rafael Yglesias - Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil

Most people, I suppose, would react with at least a show of disgust or horror at my question. Albert and I were old hands at these nightmare conversations. “I don’t want to,” he mumbled in his tight-lipped rage.

“Tell me how you’re thinking of killing her. Strangling?”

“Talking ain’t gonna stop me. You kidding yourself. I’m fucking kidding myself. I’m glad I’m going away. When I blow, I don’t want it to fuck you and my buddies.”

“I’m not trying to talk you out of killing, Albert. I know I can’t stop you with talk. I want you to tell me what you’re thinking so you’ll feel better.”

“You’re full of shit.”

“Are you gonna rape her first? Or just choke her?”

“Just let me go, Rafe. I’m gone, man. I’m really gone.” Tears appeared, although he still had a warrior’s pose.

“Choking her would stop the lying.”

“I don’t wanna choke her!” he shouted, much too loudly. I sensed the quiet gather around us. I didn’t look, fearing eye contact with the waiter would imply I needed help.

I spoke low. “What then? A gun?”

“I’m gonna put Zebra down her throat. Okay? I’ll stuff her ugly face. I’ll choke her with my come.”

“You can’t kill her with sperm.”

“No, I can’t,” he smiled. “You’re right. That’s just to warm up. I’ll cut her belly open and take out her stomach. She’ll be alive. That’s how the Japs kill. They hand you your guts so’s you can watch yourself die.”

“Do you know why you’d like to kill her that way?”

“Oh fuck, man. It don’t matter. I’m still gonna do it no matter what the fuck it a symbol of.”

“You’re going to make her pregnant. Make her heal your penis with her mouth, fill her with your sperm, make a new you in her belly and open her womb to bring him out alive. You’re going to be reborn out of the monster and that will kill it.”

Albert stared for a moment and then he shook his head sadly, pitying me. “Man, that is the dumbest shit you ever said. I mean, you’ve said some dumb shit, but that’s the master dumbness.”

“She won’t die in the real world, Albert. She can only die in your head. That’s where she lives. That’s her home. That’s where she gets her mail, that’s where she cooks her meals and that’s where she hurts you.”

“Then I’ll cut my brain out.”

“With drugs? Like she did?”

“She smart. She ain’t hurting. She got them turned around, living in that nice house, showing her stuff. She probably fucking all of ’em. She probably fucking that dyke who opened the door like she was a fucking African princess. Staring at me like it’s me who did it to her. Women, man. They flicking hate us. Clara, she ain’t a monster. She just did what they all want — cut our fucking dicks off.”

He finally took a stab at his cherry pie, consuming almost a third of it in a single gulp. The danger hadn’t passed, yet it lessened with each angry word. As long as he gave the twisting rage a voice, he wouldn’t need to hurt somebody — at least not that day. For Albert, I’m afraid, most people would think all his victories to be no better than King Pyrrhus’s.

It was late when I came home to find Diane in one of my sweatshirts (it reached to her bare knees) waving a pot holder at me with a smile. “I made dinner, can you believe it? A real dinner.” Her smile disappeared. “What’s wrong?”

I told her the story, sitting sadly on one of the two tall stools at our kitchen counter, too exhausted to take off my jacket, soaked through from my travels through the hot day.

“Sounds like he’ll be okay,” she said. She touched my hand, gently stroking it. “You did great work.”

I had reported with little emotion, my voice fading from hoarseness. I felt that I wanted to cry and my legs hurt, aching as if I had run a marathon.

Diane came around and hugged me from behind. She kissed my neck and whispered in my ear. “It must have been hard on you, very hard.”

“I’m scared,” I said and I was crying.

Diane maneuvered to hug me face-to-face. I felt ready to let go of all the tears I had ever wanted to release, when she said, “Oh baby.”

That reminded me of Clara and poisoned the endearment. My tears stopped. And I wondered, since I could be given pause by so slight a contact with Clara, how would Albert ever trust love?

“I love you,” Diane was saying and I listened to her, just her, a woman I could trust. She led me to the couch, urging me out of my damp blazer, and rested my head on her lap.

“I’m tired,” I admitted, as if she had asked a question.

“Take a nap, my sweet man. Close your eyes.”

“I want us to get married,” I said and the tears were back. I sobbed into my sweatshirt, smelling bubble bath. “I want us to make a new baby,” I said in a dopey child’s voice.

Diane didn’t ask what I meant by new baby. Probably she understood. Anyway, she answered in a confident voice, “We’ll get married and make beautiful babies and be happy forever and ever.”

I shut my eyes, felt the aches burn hotter and hotter. Soon I was asleep, dreaming of dark highways jammed with stalled vans, blocking the road. Men shouted at each other in Spanish, accusing and helpless. The women laughed, showing their breasts. And children, faces pressed against the windows, waved to me to go past them, onto the empty road ahead.

ALBERT PHONED EVERY FRIDAY AFTERNOON, THE TIME DORRIT HOUSE SET aside for the boys to make a fifteen-minute call home. Within a few weeks, he sounded fine. He was enthusiastic about the sports program; he had made the freshman football squad and it surprised him that the courses weren’t daunting. “Guess I didn’t trust the tutors,” he said, meaning the people we hired to bring the four boys at our clinic up to speed academically. He was also pleased that his schoolmates respected each other’s privacy about their pasts. He could not avoid the common shower room; but no one joked or was revolted by his scarred body. The quarterback of his squad, a half-Chicano, half-Cherokee from the Midwest, looked at them openly and said, “You’ve been there, huh?”

Albert didn’t know what he meant, but he said, “Yeah, I been there.”

After that, they were friends. Albert was the coach’s favorite running back on the freshman squad, and had been promised he would make varsity next year.

“Shit, you make the football team and they respect you,” Albert said. “I gotta tell you, I love it. I put on the pads, hit everything in sight and you know what? I don’t feel pain. I smash into guys, they roll on the ground yelling, but it’s like nothing to me. And I’m beautiful in that uniform. You should see me, man. I look like a fucking god. You should see.”

I promised I would.

“This is sublimation, right?” Diane said when I told her. “Not repression?”

“I think it’s happiness for him, anyway.”

“I hate football,” she mumbled. “Couldn’t he have joined the theater program?”

“Oh yeah. That would cheer him up. He could do Greek tragedy.”

“Give me a break. I’m just saying, Al’s really a very sweet boy.”

“But it’s not a sweet world,” I said. I must have looked grim. Diane reached across — she was driving us from the clinic to meet Joseph and Harlan at a restaurant — and tweaked my nose. I jerked away, laughing.

“It’s not a sweet world,” she repeated in a mock-petulant tone.

“Well, it’s not,” I complained, still laughing.

“Thanks for the news flash.”

“I love you,” I said.

She smiled. “Oh!” she checked the rearview mirror, switched lanes to exit the West Side Highway at Seventy-ninth, and said, “I spoke to Jonas Friedman about your friend at Webster.”