Rafael Yglesias - Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil

“Halley!” I called, alarmed. No answer. The tub water was still running. “Halley!” I called again, dropped the clothes and moved quickly toward the hall to her bedroom. I glanced at the kitchen and stopped again. The sink was full of bottles.

I stepped in and saw they were makeup containers — it looked as if every cosmetic she owned was in there. Each one was smashed, half-submerged in a dull brown mess, the color they had formed when mixed together.

I hurried toward her bedroom. I was relieved to see the bed wasn’t destroyed. The stuffed animals were snuggled peacefully between the pink pillows. Entering, though, I found the room hadn’t entirely escaped. The mirrored doors of her bedroom closet were gone. Only the blank cardboard backing was left and written in black felt-tip pen across one door was the word: LITTLE. On the other, GIRL. Two cartons were on the floor, neatly filled by shards of glass.

I looked no farther. “Halley,” I called to the bathroom door.

“I’m ready, Daddy,” she called in a hoarse but cheerful voice.

I don’t know exactly what horror I expected, but opening the door was hard. I was scared, scared enough for part of me to argue that I should run away, that whatever had happened, the job was done, and it was too late to regret the doing.

But I opened it. The lights were out as they would be for our ritual. A lamp from her bedroom provided a shaft of illumination that showed me the bath was full of bubbles, puffy white clouds overflowing the rim. Halley was submerged with only her head exposed. In the shadow I cast, I couldn’t see her face.

I flipped both light switches, the fluorescent one above the sink and the recessed light. I don’t think I actually screamed — the yell was inside my head. It seemed to me the floor was covered with blood. The sink was full of glass from the medicine cabinet mirror. There was a razor resting next to the cold water faucet. Two bloody palm prints were on its rim. Later, I discovered what seemed to be a blood-soaked floor was merely a trail of spots and one footprint by the tub. At the time my eyes went right to her.

The mounds of white bubbles were pristine except for a floating pool of blood trailing off her chin. She turned her head my way, slowly, squinting at the light and I saw the source. Beginning right below each eye were two symmetrical cuts made by the razor, like a trail of tears, that opened her cheeks down to the jaw line.

“It’s too bright,” she said faintly. “Turn them off.”

I left them on, of course. I hurried to the tub and reached into the water to pull her arms out. The wrists were untouched. She complained, “I don’t want to get out,” as I lifted her to make sure the rest of her was okay.

“Keep your head back,” I said and went into the bedroom to make two calls, the first for an ambulance and another to Stefan Weinstein, asking him to meet us at Bellevue to admit her.

“Is she a suicide?” he asked.

I considered explaining that she was in no mortal danger, that technically this was self-mutilation, not suicide, but I didn’t. I answered, “Yes.”

“Don’t be angry,” she said when I reentered the bathroom.

“I’m not angry,” I said as I searched the cabinet for gauze, Band-Aids — anything. It was empty. The wastebasket under the sink was also empty; she hadn’t dumped anything there. I pulled two white hand towels from the rack and applied them to the cuts.

“Ow!” she complained and fought me, shaking her head.

“Stop!” I yelled. “They’ll bleed more.”

“It hurts!” she whined.

“Lie still. Put your head back.” I held the towels firmly, more concerned about stopping the flow than infection. The blood immediately soaked through in lines matching the cuts and began to spread. “When did you do this?”

She rested her head on the sloping porcelain and looked at me. I didn’t need a medical degree to see in her blank eyes that she was in shock. She whispered to me, “Now I’m safe.”

“You’ll be fine,” I reassured her.

She tried to smile, but the cuts and the pressure of the towels made it more of a grimace. “No,” she told me. “You’re stupid.”

“When did you do this, Halley?”

She shut her eyes. Her chin slackened, her lips parted. She seemed to have passed out. But she hadn’t. She whispered, “Now we’re both safe.”

I DON’T HAVE AS MUCH TIME TO COMPLETE THIS MANUSCRIPT AS I WOULD like. An urgent case calls me away from the evenings I have devoted to writing it. However, given the dangers in the crude techniques I worked out for Theodore and Halley Copley, I wanted to be sure to provide a rough record before continuing my research into what I’ve somewhat whimsically labeled Evil Disorder.

Obviously, the ending with Halley was not a desirable one. The misfortune that the final crisis was provoked by an outside source, namely her encounter with Julie, was handled poorly. I was precipitate in landing the blow that everything we shared was fake; that I was not a loving incestuous Daddy, but merely a mirror; a mirror that, like her false reflections, provided an addictive fantasy. The success of the trauma therapy with Stick at the pond had misled me. I should have taken into account that Halley’s disorder, despite the superficial appearance of an attack on others, was always self-directed, a series of self-murders. To block her meant she would turn entirely against herself and not, as Stick had, against me. The pale, almost invisible scars she bears today on her face, following two rounds of reconstructive surgery, and the deeper scars she bears forever within, are my fault and my responsibility. The promise I made to myself after Gene’s death, to write a book of my failures, has been kept. Despite the success with Stick, and the fact that Halley is no longer a danger to others, I can hardly point to her as a triumph.

Stefan Weinstein treated Halley during the thirty-day stay at Bellevue for observation. He was waiting at the emergency entrance when we arrived in the ambulance. He stayed with me during her surgery. I was frightened. Stefan insisted I take a sedative and I agreed. Considering both our prejudices against drugs, that proves I was in a bad state. My guilt, and the full realization of what I had lost, unnerved me so much I told him the details of my dealings with Halley. (I don’t regret having taken the risk of admitting my manipulative behavior and not because it proved to be no risk. It helped him treat her effectively, and I owed poor Halley at least that.) I was not in immediate professional danger, since, as far as medical and legal ethics go, I was not treating her, and thus my actions couldn’t be labeled as malpractice. Stefan was angry and questioned my mental stability, which did imply a professional threat.

I did not explain my motive or my logic. He knows nothing of why I played the role of an incestuous father. I went along with his assumption that I was suffering from a breakdown, caused by the stress of leaving the clinic and the shock of Gene’s death. Given Stefan’s bias as a traditional Freudian, I couldn’t inform him of my diagnosis of Halley; and certainly I couldn’t admit that my intention had been, in his terms, to make her neurotic — or, in my terms, to disrupt her successful adaptation as a narcissist. I agreed to see Dr. Richard Goodman, a psychiatrist he recommended, as a patient. Only a few sessions were required for me to convince Dr. Goodman that I had had an episode, an episode brought to an end by the shock of Halley’s mutilation and understood thanks to his analysis.

The patient Stefan treated in Bellevue regressed to childhood. For weeks, Halley spoke with a little girl’s lisp and claimed not to recognize her mother and father when they visited. (There was a residual benefit to her psychosis. Stick felt responsible and his own desire for reform was reinforced.) I saw her only three times. After that, Stefan asked me not to visit. Although she showed no distress in my presence, chatting lucidly about Minotaur and Levin Entertainment, she would weep uncontrollably after I left. Stefan concluded that my visits were sustaining what I insisted was her delusion that I was her lover. (Of course, he didn’t agree that was a delusion. Again, one hand was tied behind my back in these arguments, since I couldn’t explain my reason for insisting we were not and had never been lovers.)