Rafael Yglesias - Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil

Julie looked worried, but said nothing. I took it. My fingers were too close to the ember and I yelped, dropping the joint into Sandy’s lap.

Sandy retrieved it quickly and did something so seductive, and yet with a bland matter-of-fact expression, that I was confused. She held the joint to my lips, offering it like food to a baby, staring into my eyes as I sucked in the smoke. It hit my lungs as fire. I choked, smoke poured from my mouth and nose, my eyes watered, and my pride was shattered. Sandy stood beside me — I had risen from the force of my lung’s rebellion — and patted my back. I felt her small breast against my right arm. Julie brought me a glass of water. I drank it sheepishly. But the beautiful trio didn’t seem to think I was ridiculous.

“You didn’t get any,” Sandy said, offering the joint again.

“No,” Julie said.

“Let me,” I said, sharply. I surprised myself with the anger in my tone.

“Okay,” Julie backed off.

This time, taking the joint, I was careful to grip it away from the ember. I sucked cautiously. They watched solemnly, as if we were participating in a sacred ritual. I held the little I inhaled for a while. I passed the stick to Kathy and opened my mouth. Nothing appeared to come out.

Kathy smoked, passed it to Sandy, who performed a trick — letting out a cloud from her mouth and reinhaling it through her nostrils. She handed the joint to Julie. She surprised me — I guess I still thought of her as basically my cousin, the conventional middle-class Long Island Jewish girl — by taking a long pull and absorbing the fire effortlessly. She looked at me. It was my turn. “You shouldn’t have any more,” Julie said. “You’ve got class in an hour.”

“Jesus, don’t mother him,” Sandy said.

“Sandy,” Julie complained. “He’s a kid. We don’t have the right to make decisions for him.”

“Self-determination,” Kathy said earnestly, choking out the words.

I laughed. “Like Vietnam,” I said and giggled.

Kathy unaccountably laughed hard. Sandy’s eyes glistened. “He’s already high.”

“I am?” I asked.

“I’d better give you some coffee,” Julie said.

“Why don’t you bring the whole group of geniuses here later?” Sandy said.

“We’ll turn them all on and invent a way to feed the whole world,” Kathy said. “That would be cool,” she added. “A radical brain trust.”

“There is a way to feed the whole world,” Sandy said. “It’s called socialism.”

“They won’t,” I said.

“Of course it would,” Sandy insisted. “If the whole world shared resources—”

“No, no!” Before realizing what I was doing, I grabbed Sandy’s bare shoulder and squeezed affectionately. “I mean the geniuses won’t come here and save the world. They wouldn’t cross the street to save the world,” I added. I enjoyed the surprisingly soft feel of Sandy’s skin. She had such a tough body and angry face that I expected a harder shell.

Kathy guffawed. Sandy searched my eyes thoughtfully. I put the tip of my index finger on the point of her shoulder and slowly traced a line to her neck. Sandy turned her head and watched; so did Julie and Kathy. My fascination was complete: I felt as if I were scooping Sandy’s silken skin onto my finger, skimming off a drop of her to keep for myself. I came to and jerked my finger back. It happened in less than a second, but I was exposed in that moment, more so than Sandy would have been if her towel dropped.

“Sorry,” I said, abashed.

“What the hell for?” Sandy walked away. “Felt good,” she commented and left the kitchen, saying, “I’m late for the strike meeting.” She moved in a graceless waddle that I forgave her for instantly. I decided there was strength and honesty in her wide, flat-footed steps.

At that day’s group, I was so high from my two tokes that my team’s work, instead of being merely somewhat incomprehensible, was sheer gibberish. My inability to keep up with them showed me how little they relied on me under normal circumstances: no one complained about my silence and inactivity. In fact, they seemed to work faster. Without any help from me, they untied a knot that had frustrated us for two weeks. They whooped with joy and called Dr. Jericho to show off. He glanced at me (I discovered later my eyes were bloodshot) while they babbled to him. He congratulated them and pointedly asked to see me after the session.

I waited in my chair until all the geniuses were gone. Jericho turned a seat backwards, draped his arms on top of its backrest, and put his chin on his hands.

“How are you doing, Rafael?” he asked, pronouncing my name my least favorite way — RAY-FEE-EL.

“Okay.”

“You don’t seem happy.”

“Happy?” I grunted.

“Is it the group?”

“I’m happy.” The buzz was gone and my back ached. I was scared by this interrogation. What did he know? Had he talked to the other kids? Or to my uncle?

“Come on. Talk to me. I have eyes. I can see you’re not relating to the others. Is it the work in particular? Is it working in a group? Would you rather go off on your own?”

“No,” I said quickly. That would be a disaster; I’d have nowhere to hide. “I just — you know, I’m sluggish today. I haven’t been doing my best work,” I said, gathering belief in this lie. “I just haven’t been contributing and I’m embarrassed. But that happens with me, you know? Goes in cycles. I can’t do anything for weeks and suddenly I’m inspired.”

“Really?” He was interested. “So you’re used to having fallow periods.”

“I have to get frustrated, you know?” Maybe this was true, I hoped. Maybe I’m a temperamental genius.

“I’ll back off.” He held up the palm of his hand. “I’m sorry. Don’t want to interfere with the process. There’s no rush. We’re not on a timetable here.” He stood up. “Just come up with something brilliant by May,” he joked.

I went home resolved to become brilliant again. My self-deception didn’t last long. I tried to work on the next step in our group’s equation that night. I couldn’t; I had fantasies about my beloved trio — kissing Julie, who became Kathy’s breasts, and finally Sandy’s tempting forest. Relieving myself of sexual tension through self-abuse (which describes perfectly my attitude to self-love) didn’t improve my mental acuity. All week I was in a daze at school. I had been thrown out of gear. I noticed that my classes were not really demanding. I merely had to pay attention, discover my teachers’ pet prejudices in history or literature or science, and mirror them back, memorizing what they thought important and remembering long enough to pass that month’s test. Nothing truly difficult was demanded of us; no innovation, no inspiration, and certainly no genius. I was bright, of course. But so were many others who weren’t getting my grades. The difference was that I was trying so hard. I wasn’t dissipating my energy by charting the treacherous waters of adolescent courtship or rebelling against my parents (in fact, my academic single-mindedness was a rebellion against my dead mother and my exiled father). I was a fraud, I concluded. An above-average student and athlete running on high, easily outclassed when put up against real talent. Of course, I was precocious in general: my life experiences had been extraordinary and so I appeared wise. But, in the privacy of my head, I knew better. My wisdom was a combination of mimicry and an unpleasant awareness of how easily I could manipulate grown-ups through subtle forms of flattery. Thanks to my writer-father and the dreadful events of my childhood, I had read adult books. Long after Francisco’s banishment my taste in novels continued to be overly mature. I enjoyed Dickens, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Dreiser and the rest of the sad and powerful opus of world literary distress, not because I was smart, as others assumed, but because they helped me understand the turbulent world that had churned my life into an odd, confusing arrangement. As a by-product, I could behave beyond my years in social situations. The terrible thing, I realized gradually over that week, was that I didn’t know myself. In a very real sense to me, I didn’t exist at all. I was a creation of the needs and fantasies of my various caretakers.