Rafael Yglesias - Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil

“You know what?” Gus said. “Rafe should come to the demo today and to some meetings next week.”

I marched beside Sandy that day. Julie and Gus walked ahead of us. I was apprehensive, expecting violence and then discovery by my uncle. But my first experience of political protest was like a stroll in the country: getting high before we started, chanting together as we marched cheerfully in the sunny spring day, linking arms at the gym site to listen to a few speeches. Gus’s was the best. His relaxed manner made him convincing. He talked to the crowd in the same tone and language he used in conversation — although it’s true that his conversation was rather like someone giving a speech. Afterwards, we ate at the college hangout, the West End Bar. Whether it was the grass or the fresh air or my exaggerated feeling of having been brave, I was famished. I ate two hamburgers while around me there were more arguments between the tables as members of rival student groups took issue with Gus and the other SDS leaders, not about whether Columbia was wrong, but what exactly should be done about it.

It got to be time for me to head for my uncle’s Manhattan apartment. I announced I had to return to the girls’ place for my overnight bag.

“Overnight bag,” someone repeated. “Far out,” he added and laughed.

“I’ll go with you,” Sandy said.

“I’ll take him—” Julie said.

“He can take my key and leave it there,” Kathy said.

Sandy drained her coffee cup, stood up and said with a frown, “No, I gotta go, anyway. Come on.” She left the bar quickly without me, as if I were an afterthought.

“Bye, honey,” Julie said. She took my hand, pulled me to her and kissed me on the cheek. She had never called me honey before and the kiss, although chaste, was impressed firmly, with an affection that also seemed new.

Walking with Sandy, still thrilled by the lingering sensation of Julie’s lips, I thought about why my cousin had become physical with me. It was because I marched in the demonstration, I decided, disappointed by that conclusion.

My gloomy turn of mind must have been obvious. “You okay?” Sandy asked while we were in the elevator going up.

The familiar construct of my relationship with Julie and her friends was depressing. I experienced this dismay (its cause so obvious from this distance) as an enervating achiness, like the onset of a flu, rather than as a realization that I had created yet another hall of distorting mirrors in which I would never find a true reflection or escape from my emotional maze.

[The dazzlingly rapid re-creation of self-defeating patterns in a neurotic is exactly what makes therapy so often frustrating for both doctor and patient. I have come, in a perverse way, to admire the resilience of mental illness. It is helpful for a therapist to bear in mind that neurotic behavior is actually a survival mechanism, however misguided. Its longevity is a sign of the patient’s passion to live and in that paradox there is hope for a cure.]

Sandy put her hand on my arm and repeated, “You okay?”

The terror lived again. My skull was fragile, my skin vibrating: leaks were about to spring. Say what you’re feeling, I urged myself, desperate to fend off madness. “I’m sad,” I said.

Sandy nodded. She didn’t ask why, to my surprise. She rubbed my arm and smiled encouragingly, but never said a word. The elevator doors opened. She marched out in her waddle walk, saying, “Come on.” She opened the apartment door, tossed the keys into a bowl and kicked off her sandals. The soles of her feet were black. She extended her left hand, fingers asking for mine.

I looked at her, not understanding.

She wiggled her fingers again, eyes mischievous, and the request was clear.

She was strong and confident and I knew that she, unlike me, was real. I gave her my hand.

She towed me through the hall into her room. Her platform bed was unmade, the yellow cotton blanket twisted at the foot, a pillow squashed against the wall. She kicked the door shut, pulled me to the bed and we sat, side by side on its edge. With a light touch, she stroked my left cheek once, ran her fingers through my hair, traveling to the back until she held my now very solid skull in her palm. She moved close to my lips and whispered, “You okay with this?”

My need was so heavy that I could hardly manage to do more than nod.

She kissed me. She pushed my lips apart with her tongue and explored my mouth restlessly; her hands were also restless — rubbing my back, kneading my neck, as if she wanted to mold me to her shape. I woke from passivity and pushed back into her mouth, for a moment tasting the eggs she had for brunch mix with my hamburgers, and then we were only a single human flavor. I touched her thin hair and dropped my hands to her back. It was soft, much softer than I expected from her vigorous body.

She broke from the kiss to unbutton my shirt. She undid each one with deliberate care, reverently. I kissed the top of her head once or twice as she descended and thought to myself: “Thank God. Thank God.” When she reached my waist, she paused at the sight of the bulge in my jeans. She put a hand on it, raised her eyes and looked earnest. “Are you a virgin?” she asked.

I nodded.

This information seemed to galvanize her. She yanked my belt once, said, “Take ’em off,” and stood up. She pulled her T-shirt over her head and into the air in a single motion. Without a pause, she had her jeans open. They dropped to the floor. She pushed them off the rest of the way with her feet. Fingers slid under her red panties and shoved. She stepped out of them and looked at me. I hadn’t moved. The sight of her frank nakedness was mesmerizing. Her breasts were small, nipples dark and turned a little outwards, like poorly coordinated eyes.

“You’re beautiful,” I said.

She laughed. “Your turn,” she said.

I didn’t trust my trembling legs to stand. I tried to get my jeans and underpants off simultaneously while still on the bed. They got stuck on my thighs. I had never seen my penis in so ridiculous and desperate shape: levitating off me, flagging the world for attention. Sandy laughed again and pulled at the tangled mass of clothes. I flopped my legs up and down, like a baby being changed, as she negotiated them past my knees and ankles. She pushed my clothes onto the floor, then moved to lie beside me. We turned our bodies to each other. She kissed me briefly and looked at my erection. I followed her eyes. She lightly ran three fingertips up from its base to the head. It might as well have been an electric shock. My thighs and torso came off the mattress and I groaned.

“That feels good,” she said, not a question.

I laughed.

She found my right hand and put it at the top of her bushy mound. She guided my finger to the moist split of her sex. “This is where it feels good to me,” she said, holding my middle finger on the bump of her clitoris. “But not too hard,” she said, moving it. “Like this—”

Without thinking, I flicked her hand away and straightened my fingers so they formed a smooth surface. Automatically, I gently rolled down and up, then side to side, massaging all of her sex with a subtle emphasis at the spot she thought so crucial; She looked surprised. I shut my eyes and remembered effortlessly: the gentle uneven pattern, down, up, around, side to side … The whole region loosened and opened as her warm body arched against me. Only this time, I was alive too, so thrilled by her belly’s warm hug of my penis that I had to concentrate hard to replicate the complicated rhythm my mother had enjoyed.

I must seem stupid to the lay reader, or at least very confused, when I describe what happened next. Despite the surrender of Sandy’s body, despite my own delicious excitement, a cold fact landed on my neck and froze my brain, severing it from the passion of my body. I understood, finally, with all the knowledge and emotional maturity truly necessary to comprehend the fact: I had made love to my mother.