Rafael Yglesias - Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil

Sandy, the third roommate, appeared from the shower, hair wet, a big blue towel wrapped around her torso, and launched without preamble into an attack on Columbia University’s plan to convert nearby buildings they owned into a gym and also faculty and student housing, in the process evicting poor, mostly black families. Her lecture was pornographic to me, although her square chunky body wasn’t that appealing. Despite the fact that more of her was covered than Kathy and Julie, the simple knowledge that there was nothing on under the terry cloth, that if the tucked-in corner beneath her left arm should slide out I would be two feet from a totally naked woman, forced me to put both arms in my lap. Once again, Julie noticed the glaze in my eyes. She smiled knowingly at me while Sandy went through arguments that linked academic elitism to racism and then to genocide, until (as is always possible when talking abstractions) Columbia’s desire to compete more effectively with their bête noire (Harvard) by keeping admission standards high and luring top-notch professors and students with offers of elegant apartments and new athletic facilities had been transformed into the moral equivalent of slavery and genocide. To my surprise, Sandy addressed most of her diatribe at me, laboriously explaining her terminology, obviously assuming these ideas would be shocking and difficult for me to follow. In fact, thanks to my boyhood, I understood Sandy very well. “We send their kids to die in Vietnam and destroy their communities at home,” Sandy concluded.

Julie brought Sandy coffee and said, “It’s so depressing.”

“How do the kids in your school feel about the war?” Sandy asked when I did nothing but stare at her, arms still folded over my lap. She adjusted the top of her towel — it was coming undone slowly, a fraught and suspenseful visual.

“They don’t like it,” I said.

“Are they organized?”

Kathy, now dressed in jeans and a peasant blouse, reappeared. She carried a plastic bag with marijuana and cigarette papers. I knew she was about to roll a joint; I had once seen it done in the bathroom at school. Julie glanced at me a little nervously. “I don’t think he knows what you mean by organize,” Kathy said to Sandy. She noticed Julie’s discomfort about the drug. “Oh,” she said, “I forgot.”

“You’re against the war, right?” Sandy said.

“It’s okay,” I said to Kathy. “I don’t care if you roll a joint.” I knew the talk, but they were only words to me. The cool kids at Great Neck High who smoked grass lived side by side with me, so I could see them, but, socially, they were behind an impenetrable glass wall. I belonged to two cliques the hipsters held in contempt: the nerds and the jocks.

Kathy smiled with relief. “Your cousin told us not to corrupt you, but I forgot.”

“You’ve smoked?” Julie asked, with some anxiety, which made no sense to me.

I nodded, unable to speak the lie. I felt the same about this as if she had asked if I were a virgin. It was unmanly to admit my lack of experience.

“Do you see how unfair it is that we’re sending only the lumpen whites and blacks to fight in Vietnam?” Sandy said.

“Well, but …” I began, forgetting I didn’t want to engage with her.

“But what? It’s not unfair?”

“If you’re against the war, how would it make things better if they sent all kinds to fight?”

“Because that would stop it. If middle-class white boys were dying over there, everybody would be screaming for it to be over.”

Kathy and Julie and Sandy looked at me, enjoying (in a friendly way) the beautiful spectacle of what they assumed was a naive boy being illuminated by this insight — or radicalized, to use their jargon. It was awkward for me. I felt I was deeply in love with all three of them, although I thought Sandy was rather stupid and ugly, and that Kathy was a ditz. I admired their idealism and self-confidence and yet I thought they were doomed to fail. Also, I was very vain of my intelligence — which was getting punishing blows in the “genius program.” All in all, I couldn’t stop myself from dropping my guise of disinterest and ignorance of politics to show off. “But all wars are fought by the poor,” I said. “Forty million died in World War II, most of them working-class, and that didn’t end until we had dropped two A-bombs on civilians and pulverized all of Germany’s major cities.”

“That’s different—” Sandy began.

“War,” I talked over her, “is the logical end product of a competitive society. Capitalism is the most competitive of all systems and the United States is the purest capitalist nation in history. Without war, the United States would collapse.”

“Exactly—” Sandy revved up.

“And so,” I continued, “the government will sacrifice anything, all of us if they have to, to win. Faced with a choice between losing American control of foreign markets and suppressing American citizens, the U.S. will prefer to kill us. From their point of view, they have no choice. To win in Vietnam, LBJ would let his own children die. That’s the logic of his situation.”

“Wow,” Kathy said and lit a joint. The loose end of paper burned in an instant, sending a long gray ash floating down onto the arms covering my lap.

“Right on,” Sandy said.

“Oh God, Rafe,” Julie said, not a rebuke, but in pain at my scenario.

“Why are you going to this elitist math program?” Sandy said. She sat down on a chair next to me. The towel split open across her left thigh up to her waist and I saw, shadowed by the terry cloth umbrella above her groin, a small, thick bush of black hair. I jerked my head up sharply and looked into Sandy’s earnest, absolutely asexual glare of interest. “I mean, since you understand this pig system,” Sandy added, “why be part of it?”

“Give him a break, Sandy,” Julie said.

Kathy finally let out a small wisp of the smoke from her first toke and said in a choked voice, “Because he is a genius.”

Her remark was almost as thrilling as Sandy’s opened towel. By then, I had absorbed the fact that I wasn’t a genius (at least I had enjoyed five years of believing my uncle’s delusion) and knew my fellow students were aware of this dangerous truth. Maybe I could continue to fool people in areas other than mathematics: less objective disciplines, such as world politics. You could say 2 plus 2 equals 5 in politics and be considered brilliant, rather than someone who can’t add. Soon my uncle would learn from Dr. Jericho that I wasn’t a prize pupil. I had to compensate somehow.

“I know he’s a genius,” Sandy said.

Boy, this is easy, I thought and glanced at the widening canyon of her towel. I could now see all of her most private region, including the resumption of white skin above. What was in that forest? my whole body wanted to know. I knew how to touch it, I knew what it meant to Sandy, but what would it mean to me? Something extraordinary, I was sure, a place where lies and secrets had no more use, where the truth was no longer a danger.

“But you have a responsibility to use your big brain,” Sandy went on, “to help people. We’re organizing branches of SDS in all the high schools and you should be in the vanguard in your school. You could really educate others.”

They all pitched into this topic, discussing among themselves whether I should radicalize my high school peers or the geniuses at Columbia. “Why not both?” Sandy said. But she agreed with Kathy and Julie that, if I could get the prodigies to denounce Columbia’s gym construction, it would really help the cause. And cost me an inheritance of between two and three hundred million dollars, I thought.

“They wouldn’t do it,” I told the women. Each of them had a toke of the joint by now and Sandy, who, unfortunately, had rearranged her towel so my view was ruined, turned her hand toward me — the gesture of Michelangelo’s God offering life to Adam — only she was offering my first taste of an illicit drug.