Rafael Yglesias - Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil

During homeroom that sad week, I made a list of all the things I did: tennis, swimming, listening to classical music, chess, reading novels, math, science, history, writing, and so on. I stared at each one, vowing to put a check next to those activities I enjoyed doing for their own sake. Several times I checked one. I believe I did pick reading novels, science, and listening to music. (At least I should have.) But I erased them as I remembered how careful I was to let Uncle or my teachers know what books I read or what composers I liked. Everything was mixed with the vanity of a performance. What did I enjoy when there was no audience to applaud my taste?

I flipped over the sheet and angrily wrote the truth: masturbation, Oreo cookies, Coke, spare ribs, hot dogs with sauerkraut, naked women — and I stopped. I wrote: women. I wrote: breasts, vaginas, belly buttons, necks, eyes, earlobes, long hair, curly, black, blonde … I loved women. That was the answer. Appetite. Pleasures for my stomach and my penis. That’s what I was: a creature of desires, unsophisticated and certainly devoid of genius.

I tore up the sheet of paper, tore it up into pieces so tiny no one could ever reconstruct it. I buried the mass in my desk and looked at the students in my homeroom, some of them presumably my friends. Everything they knew and believed about me, no matter whether they liked or hated me, was false. Each day they took attendance, I claimed to be present, but I wasn’t really there — I was hardly in my own skin.

The world swayed. My skull cracked open. My mind seemed to be exiting my flesh, leaving this stranger to find a home in another world, with different choices of bodies to inhabit. It was terrifying: I felt the core of my being try to escape from me. I shut my eyes, gritted my teeth, and whispered over and over: “You’re real. You’re real. You’re real.”

I was going mad. I knew it suddenly. I shut up and hugged myself, eyes still closed. Strange, I reflected, that I hadn’t considered the likelihood before, given my mother. My uncle was the genius. My mother, my father and me, we were the bad seed the world thought we were, the envious weaklings of the earth who needed to be cared for by those who had genuine energy, conviction, and talent. The moral universe spun and spun in my head. I was so ill from the loss of self I couldn’t get out of my chair when the bell rang.

I watched the others rise and leave. I wished I could cry out: “Please help me. I want to be me but I can’t. I want to love you but I can’t. I want to be loved but I don’t know who I am.”

“Forgot something?” my homeroom teacher asked.

“I’m sick,” I said with perfect accuracy, for once.

THE FOLLOWING MORNING I WAS TAKEN TO DR. HALSTON’S PRIVATE office at Hillside Psychiatric Hospital. My uncle waited in the reception area. I had hardly moved or talked since the bolt of terror in my homeroom. I offered no explanation, not to the school nurse, my aunt or uncle. When asked, I would say in a whisper, “I don’t feel well. I can’t do anything right now.” Bernie drove me to Long Island Jewish and they discovered nothing physically wrong. It was immediately clear to the school nurse, my aunt and to the doctors — everyone except Bernie — that the problem was in my head. He fought against this conclusion until nightfall. His initial reaction of denial was understandable. Abruptly, without any apparent cause, his thoroughbred wouldn’t run; he wanted to believe the cause was a minor sprain, not the jockey and certainly not the demands of the race.

After the tests, I turned on the television in my room, lay on the bed and watched numbly, not speaking or eating the food they brought in on a tray. At some point I napped. I tried to keep my mind blank and my body still. Thoughts could crack my skin and then I would leak out; I felt movement might also do ghastly damage. When they forced me to walk — from the examination table to the car, for example — that took forever. I slid one foot forward, smiled mildly at my escorts so they wouldn’t be too annoyed as I paused, and after being sure nothing had dropped from me or spilled out, then slid my lagging foot to join the other.

Uncle asked, “What’s wrong?” over and over until he shouted at me, “Goddamn it, say something or I’ll break your head!” His fists were clenched and his face flushed. He scared himself and walked out. I was frightened by his obvious lack of tolerance for my weakness, but to go back to performing for him was so much more dangerous and terrible, that his annoyance at my passivity couldn’t shake me from it. He looked in during the evening several times after that outburst, glaring at me with rage, but said nothing, except on his last visit. “We’ll see Dr. Halston tomorrow,” he said. “He’ll help you. Don’t worry.” The language was caring, his tone impatient.

So there I was, facing my mother’s doctor. His thick black frames were the same he had worn seven years before, but his thinning blond hair was totally gone. Seeing him took me back to Ruth’s insanity, and confirmed that I was doomed, like her.

“Tell me, Rafe — They call you Rafe?”

I nodded, very gingerly.

“Tell me, what were you doing when you were in class — was it a class?”

“Home—” I paused so my voice wouldn’t shatter anything with too many syllables. “—room,” I finished.

“Homeroom. That’s not a class?”

I shook my head.

“Like a study hall?”

I nodded.

“Were you studying?”

“No,” I said and a laugh came, unbidden, out of me. That was scary.

“It’s okay to laugh,” Halston said. “I’m not a teacher. This isn’t the principal’s office. You haven’t done anything bad. You’re not here to be punished.”

I didn’t believe him.

He waited for a response. When none came, he said, “I know you’re very smart so I’m not going to pretend about what I’m doing. When someone has a mental illness — and maybe you do, I don’t know — like any doctor, I have to take your temperature, a blood sample, a few X-rays. Only there’s no way to do that when it comes to what goes on in our minds except by asking questions and the patient answering honestly.”

I said nothing.

“I can’t give you a medicine that will force you to be well. You have to want to be well. Do you want to be well?”

I nodded. I heard him but I tried not to use my intelligence at all. I stared at those thick glasses and wondered about them: were they plastic? They looked so strong I speculated they might be made of steel. But steel would be too heavy on his head. The weight might decapitate him.

“What you say here won’t be repeated.” He must have seen my look of contempt because he blanched. “You don’t believe me?”

I didn’t move at all.

Halston nodded at the closed door to his waiting room. “I promise you, on my oath as a doctor — and believe me, there’s nothing I treasure more than that — no one, including your uncle, will ever hear a word of what you tell me.”

I didn’t wish to think it through. The words — money can buy anything — flashed in my head. I was obliged to answer: “I don’t believe you.” Challenging him was less scary than using my brain.

Halston didn’t take offense, as I expected. He leaned back and ran a hand over his bald head. Must be nice, I thought, feeling a hard shell. “Is it because of me? Or would you not believe it about any doctor?”

“Nothing personal,” I said. I chewed up the words by keeping my lips tight. That worked well for me. My skin didn’t move as much and I could say more words with less effort. Unfortunately, I sounded like a cartoon character, or someone talking from inside a box.