Rafael Yglesias - Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil

“I’m probably gonna call you tomorrow,” Gene said. “I’m probably gonna be back here in a week.”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“But just in case I pull this off, I want to thank you for—” he interrupted himself to say, “You know I spoke to Dad the other day.”

“How is he?”

“Complaining, as always. His career’s not going well. But, anyway, he asked me how I was doing and I told him, I really told him. Everything. You know.”

“Halley also?”

“Yep. And he actually lectured me about how important it was to try to keep my family together. Can you believe it?”

“Yes,” I said. “I remember how long he tried to.”

“I guess that’s right. Anyway, he said, even though he had a hard time living with Mom, that the years we were together, you know, when I was a kid, that, in the end, it was the happiest time of his life.” Gene swallowed, moved. When he could speak easily, he added, “He told me when he has another show, he’s going to put a picture of me and Mom in it, a picture he took when I was a child.” Tears appeared in Gene’s solemn eyes, the same worried and yet trusting eyes that had looked at me furtively thirteen years before, pleading for rescue. “He said I was a good son and that he was proud of me. He said he knew I would do the right thing.”

“I agree with him,” I said.

Gene sighed. “Anyway, I didn’t mean to say that to compliment myself.”

“You’re sure about that?” I asked with a smile.

“Really,” he smiled back. “I meant to say that I would never been able to talk to him about all this if it weren’t for you. I would never have been able to get through Black Dragon, or have had the nerve to come on to Halley. Even if that was wrong, it made me happy. It’s thanks to you.”

“Well, you’re welcome. But you—”

He interrupted. “I know. I did it. Still. Thanks.”

He stood up, dressed that day in fashionable black shoes, faded blue-jeans, a black polo shirt, and a light gray sport jacket, his hair slicked back, his eyes, at our parting, at last direct and unafraid. He put out his hand and said, “I hope this is goodbye, Dr. Neruda.”

As I shook it, I have to admit a surge of vanity: I was proud of what I had wrought.

JOSEPH STEIN DIED A YEAR AFTER MY LAST SESSION WITH GENE. HE survived less than two years since testing positive, a mere fourteen months following the first symptoms of full-blown AIDS. To the horror of his colleagues and friends, he made no attempt to stave off the disease, refusing not only standard therapies but those in the experimental stage that, in his privileged position, he could have had access to. He dropped out of sight after the onset, severing contact with everyone, including his lover, Harlan. No one knew that he took a long tour of Asia and Europe. Later we found out that during his travels he twice fell ill with pneumonia and tried to avoid hospitalization. The second time, the delay in getting treatment killed him: the infection was too far gone and complications led to heart failure. He died, of all places, in Poland. His behavior was pointed, clearly suicidal. He knew better than anyone that with proper preventative care he might have lived for many years. I learned of his death from his mother. She nursed him for the final three days of his life. At last her nightmare came true: she returned to the scene of the Holocaust, to the sick bed of a son who was vulnerable to every germ.

Surely Joseph meant something by these actions. Whether they were a rebuke or a homage to his parents, I don’t know. Whether his purposeful trip to Poland while dying — he collapsed at the Warsaw airport — was part of a delusion or merely curiosity about the scene of his parents’ drama, again I don’t know. Mrs. Stein didn’t volunteer if she knew and I felt asking whether he explained himself to her was inappropriate. Besides, she might be ignorant of his reasons. Until he called to say he was dying in a hospital in Warsaw, she hadn’t heard from him in a year. She told me when she arrived the next day at his bedside, he was incoherent most of the time. She reported that in one of his lucid moments he said there was something in his will for me, and I had better do what he asked or he would never let me win at chess. “What does that mean?” she asked.

“He always beat meHe always beat me,” I said. “He was always smarter than me and he liked to remind me of it.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. Her calmness, now widowed and without her child, intimidated me. She was tiny. Her pale skin hardly obscured the veins and bones of her hands. Her chin quivered all the time and her eyes were as lifeless as a doll’s. Yet speaking of her son, her voice was strong, apparently untroubled. “He was crazy. Didn’t know what he was saying. He was very fond of you. He probably thought it was a funny joke. He liked making people laugh,” she said, a quality of Joseph’s that I must have missed.

I understood when the will was read. Other than a trust fund for Mrs. Stein, he left his money to Harlan. Joseph’s cold behavior to his lover, breaking off their relationship and making contact impossible, only intensified Harlan’s grief. He said, “Fuck you,” when we heard the clause leaving the money to him, but he broke down on his way out, sagging into the arms of a mutual friend to sob. Mrs. Stein watched them comfort each other impassively. She seemed all the more isolated because she hadn’t met most of Joseph’s intimates until his memorial service. I felt useless to her and angry at Joseph. I was angry at him for many things, in particular his legacy to me. His message referred to the fact that he left me his papers, all his research on the brain, in the hope, he wrote, that I would use my skill to explain his theories to the general public. Was that nastiness? Egomania?

To my surprise, Diane took his side. “I think you’re wrong,” she said to my speculation. We were walking home from the lawyer’s office in Midtown to our apartment on the West Side. It was an early spring day. Although cool, the sun was out. Central Park was crowded with people wearing as few clothes as they could bear. “He left things to only three people — his mother, Harlan and you. The three people he loved most.”

“Or resented the most.”

“Come on, Rafe. And he left you his work, the thing he valued most. He’s trusted you with it, even though he knows you don’t agree with him. That’s quite a compliment.”

“I don’t know. Maybe it just amuses him to think of me saddled with the job of disseminating ideas I don’t agree with.”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t think that highly of Joseph. I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but he was too much of an egomaniac to risk throwing away his life’s work just to tease you. He trusted you. He knew you’ll do him justice.”

“Fuck you, Joseph,” I said. But I began reading and making notes on his papers the following weekend.

Two weeks later I took on a collaborator for the job, Amy Glickstein, a brilliant young neurobiologist who shares Joseph’s faith in biochemical determinism. I asked for her help after an incident of great significance in my personal life that changed my attitude as to whether I was fit for the job of exclusively representing a point of view other than my own. My father returned to the United States. I learned this in a straightforward way, but it was still a shock. On a Thursday afternoon, I picked up the phone at the clinic and a reedy male voice asked in Spanish if I was Rafael Neruda. When I said yes, the caller continued in rapid Spanish that I couldn’t follow. I interrupted, asking if he could speak English.

“Not good English. I am Francisco Neruda,” he announced.