Rafael Yglesias - Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil

Julie didn’t answer Sandy. She stared at me — I grinned back — with a hopeless and rather sad expression. Sandy poured coffee for us, handing me a mug. She sat down, rubbed my shoulder lovingly for a moment before reaching for the milk carton. “Go ahead,” she said, glancing at Julie.

Julie sighed. “I think we should talk about this alone.”

“If it’s about me and Rafe then he should be part of it,” Sandy said.

“It’s okay,” I said.

“I don’t think it’s okay,” Sandy said.

“I don’t have a problem with what Rafe is doing,” Julie said, surprising all of us with her angry, pointed tone.

“What does that mean?” Sandy asked, pushing her chair away from me to face Julie. The raspy sound it made on the floor lent an ominous sound to her question.

“Of course Rafe is going to like …” Julie shook her head, irritated and embarrassed. “I mean, I can’t hold him responsible …” Again, she couldn’t finish the thought.

“Responsible for what?” Sandy leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees, coffee mug dangling between her legs. Her pose was like a construction worker’s on a break.

“He’s a teenager! ” Julie said as if that settled everything.

“Not in bed,” Sandy said and laughed with pleasure.

Kathy giggled, then lowered her eyes.

“It’s not funny,” Julie said.

“You wouldn’t have a problem about this if I were a man,” Sandy said.

“Of course I would. Everybody would. Especially you. You’d be screaming about what a pig you are.”

Sandy shook her head, turned away from Julie, put her coffee cup on the table and said to Kathy, “I don’t get it. I don’t know what this is about.”

“Look,” Julie said. “I’m responsible for Rafe. He’s sixteen years old. Look at him. He’s dropped out of the math program, he’s sitting in his shorts smoking a joint. This is crazy. This is just irresponsible. That’s all. You can tell yourself all kinds of stories, but what it amounts to—”Julie abruptly cut off her speech and slammed an open cabinet door shut. Its bang made us all jump. She shouted at Sandy, “God damn it! This isn’t what we’re fighting for!”

“You’re not my baby-sitter,” I said.

Julie, concentrating on her friend, glanced at me as if she had forgotten I was there. She was fully dressed, in the same leotard and jeans she wore to the demonstration the previous week. She looked more beautiful than ever, almost a different species than Sandy. Despite my odd state of mind, I understood that her concern for me was genuine — whether or not my hope that it was motivated by jealousy was right. It was obvious Julie cared about my welfare in a way Sandy did not, or ever would.

“I’m okay,” I said to her in an intimate tone, wishing that the others weren’t there. I felt, at that moment, that if we were alone, I would have had the strength to tell her the truth, that I loved her, had loved her since the day she had tried to defend me from my mother’s scolding about the hunt for the Afikomen, that I knew she possessed something almost no one did: an unselfish heart. I could measure the breadth of its generosity against the narrowness of my own.

“I’m not angry at you, Rafe,” she said softly.

“This is fucked up,” Sandy said. She stood up and got between me and Julie. “Come on. Let’s go for a walk and deal with this.”

They left. Kathy passed me the joint. Looked down at her paper while I took a couple of hits. She raised her eyes when I passed it back and said, “The Vietcong are amazing, you know?”

I agreed.

I felt alone. Increasingly, as I absorbed Dr. Halston’s interpretation, that was how I experienced life. Not the quaking terror of a self without boundaries, but claustrophobic behind the walls he had built. Since everything was really happening inside me, the real world had lost its frightening quality, its ability to trigger panic. That was good, but unfortunately, it had also lost its promise of redemption. By the time Julie and Sandy returned, I didn’t care what they had said to each other, or felt impelled to act by the revelation that I was still deeply in love with Julie. One was unimportant, the other hopeless. I liked having sex with Sandy, and if Julie had managed to put a stop to it (she had failed) I would have been angry, but without much conviction, since other than the sex, I really didn’t want to go on spending time with Sandy. When Sandy took me to her room after the walk, and somewhat gleefully told me of Julie’s “bougie and fucked-up reaction to our liberated relationship,” how she had “forced Julie to confront the contradictions inside her head,” all I felt was despair that more people had become a victim of my evil machinations. Why were they all so helpless against me, whether they were dull or successful, Latin or Jew, adult or youth, Communist or capitalist? Was it a world of fools? Was that what my mother had really meant, that being crazy is knowing, really knowing, just how easily humanity can be manipulated and therefore, how hopeless it is to try and save them?

I believe it was then, or sometime during those weeks, that I first thought of adopting my mother’s solution and killing myself. Her method didn’t appeal to me. I learned of her self-immolation from Dr. Halston. I had known of the fact of her suicide for a few years, but not much about the details. He told them to me in a rather cold voice — her actions were, after all, something of a professional rebuke. He wanted to know why I asked, but I didn’t tell him. I had no secrets from him and I was glad to have one. By then I had come to the conclusion that keeping secrets was part of my genetic makeup. The night I heard the full story of her suicide from Halston, I wondered why the images of Ruth, putting up her sign, pouring gasoline over her wild hair, staring at the crowds with her green eyes, and lighting a match, didn’t move me, either to horror or pity. Because I didn’t think she was wrong or foolish or mad to have done it, except for her choice of dying. Too painful, for one thing. And not damning enough. Her statement, THIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD WILL END, was too easy to dismiss.

I found a nearly full bottle of Seconal in my uncle’s bathroom. There were more than enough to kill me. I stole it, convinced he would be less suspicious of it disappearing, given the confusion of three residences, the mansion, this temporary one, and his pied-à-terre in Manhattan, than if I merely took some of the pills. Besides, I wanted to be sure to die. I knew institutionalization would follow a failure and that was more horrible to me than life or death. I began writing my farewell statement. It would take a few days, since I planned a full confession as well as messages and apologies to Bernie, my father, Julie, my grandparents …

That caused me to wonder about Jacinta and Pepín, with a pang of loss. I was alone. Uncle, as usual, was in Manhattan, Richard and Kate had fed me and gone to bed, I had smoked a joint, written the first page of my suicide note, and there was nothing to stop me from picking up the phone, dialing long-distance information and calling them. Of course, my uncle would see it on the bill at the end of the month, but I would be dead by then.

I hesitated for an hour, crept down the hall to check that the servants were asleep, and then made my bold move, sneaking into Uncle’s empty bedroom to use his phone. My heart was pounding. Why was I so nervous, I wondered, since I planned to end the world’s ability to punish or reward me? I had to will myself through the enervating terror of dialing, my voice trembling as I asked the operator for the number. My fingers barely had the strength to write them down. I felt as if I were going to lose consciousness as I rotated the dial and waited through six long rings before I heard my grandfather’s sleepy voice answer, in Spanish, “Hola?”