Rafael Yglesias - Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil

AFTER MY STOMACH WAS PUMPED AT LONG ISLAND JEWISH, UNCLE arranged for me to be admitted to the Turson Child/Adolescent Psychiatric Hospital on Manhattan’s Upper East Side to cover the ninety-day observation period required by law. A psychiatric resident, Dr. Susan Bracken, was assigned to my case. My life had been saved thanks to the conscientiousness of Uncle’s butler, Richard. Alerted by my uncle that we were coming home in the middle of the night, he tried to wait up, only to doze off. Starting awake at four A.M. and finding that he had missed our entrance, Richard crept up to my door, heard the radio playing faintly and looked in to ask if I wanted something. He noticed the open window and my nakedness. Deciding I would catch a chill, he fetched a blanket and, while covering me, saw my note and the bottle of pills.

Susan Bracken is nearly six feet tall and has strong features as well as a deep voice, but she speaks mildly, probably an old habit from adolescent self-consciousness about her size. She came to interview me in my private room the following evening. She pulled the shades on my barred window, depriving me of a gloomy view of the East River shrouded by rain.

She startled me right away. “You really wanted to do away with yourself, didn’t you?” she said, pulling a metal folding chair next to my bed. My legs and arms were in restraints. My mouth was perpetually dry and my head throbbed. I watched her cross those long legs, her white doctor’s smock swishing noisily. She glanced at the folder she had opened, propped by a knee. “You took so many Seconals that even getting to you so fast one of the emergency team was sure you’d be a vegetable.” She smiled. “Actually, if my memory of the ER guys is right, they don’t say vegetable, they say zucchini.”

I didn’t think her funny. I stared through the stabbing pain in my temples, wishing I could fire them out and disintegrate her.

“Lookit,” she said. “I’m gonna lay my cards on the table. I know a lot about you already. I’ve got your—” she held up my farewell letter “—what do I call it? A suicide note? I mean, it’s eight pages long. It’s almost a short story.” She lowered her flat wide brow, like an ape’s I thought at the time, and studied my document. Thanks to her heavy forehead and deep-set eyes I couldn’t see their color or expression.

“You’re ugly,” I said to her.

“The way I’m talking? Or the way I look?” She untangled her legs, leaving my folder on her thighs, and comically spread her arms as if displaying herself.

“Both.” My voice, from disuse and the hangover, was a croak.

“Really? Everyone tells me I’m a,” she put a sarcastic emphasis on the word, “handsome woman.” She smiled at me. “I think I prefer being called ugly. Anyway, it’s rather unusual for a suicide as determined as you to survive. I would say the chances you’ll try it again are excellent. Oh, maybe not right away. You’ll be too depressed for a while. Funny thing, but killing oneself seems to take a certain amount of effort. Real depression is just too overwhelming even to plan a suicide. Anyway, I’ve also, thanks to your uncle, got all of Dr. Halston’s private notes. That’s quite unusual as well, but I guess your uncle can make unusual things happen.”

I nodded.

Susan shut my folder and dropped it to the floor. She put her elbows on her knees and leaned close. I got a clear look at her eyes. They were a muddy brown and too small for her big face. They were also, although she looked boldly at me, somehow shy. “Here’s my problem. I have all this history about you and yet I haven’t heard it from you. I don’t really know if I should get your history again, assuming you’ll talk to me, or whether I should violate my training and tell you that, unfortunately, I’ve already reached a conclusion about you, maybe even a wrong conclusion, and that I’m interested in your story, very interested, and I want to talk to you although I think I’m too prejudiced to work with you.”

I groaned. “What are you talking about?” I croaked.

“You sound hoarse. Want something to drink?” I nodded. She poured a cup of water from supplies on the night table, put a straw in it and held it to my lips. When I was satisfied, she said, “I’ll just say it. I think you like being a victim. I think you like feeling guilty. From reading your letter, it seems as though you, not your parents, not your uncle, not the world, but you are responsible for everything. I wouldn’t be surprised if you told me you think you started the war.”

Very quickly we were having a fight whose tone was an intimate argument between equals. Susan brought up the events in Tampa and Spain, insisting I was a child and had no responsibility for my actions, my inactions, my thoughts, or my desires. She didn’t touch the subject of incest, one way or another, whether it was fantasy or truth. I objected, throwing at her Dr. Halston’s (I thought they were mine) insights about my memories being projected fantasies from my id.

She finally cut me off. “What crap. Look. Did you get those Cubans to attack your mother?”

“No—”

“Did you make your father go to Cuba and desert her?”

“No—”

“Did you make your mother go crazy?”

“No—”

“What did you do, actually do, that was wrong?”

“I told you. I lied about my father.”

“Oh yeah, right.”

We had been talking forever it seemed to me. “Isn’t our time up?” I asked. My head hurt worse than ever, arguing with my arms literally tied was intensely frustrating.

She laughed. “Listen, I’m so out of the textbooks, stuff like that is beside the point. I told you. I can’t work with you. I’ve got all kinds of problems with your way of seeing things. Here’s what I mean. You told Dr. Halston you lied about your father because you were angry that he had left you and your mother?”

I nodded.

“So why did you go away with him in the first place?”

I had no answer, but I was sure that was because I felt ill and tired.

“Were you happy to go with him to Spain?”

I nodded.

“How come?”

“I loved him!”

“But you were so angry at him you lied and made him an exile from his own country? So why did you go in the first place?”

“I was testing him. Or really, testing myself, seeing if I could suppress my murderous impulses toward him.”

“You’re saying it was an elaborate plan of a frustrated ten-year-old’s ego? Not just a scared little boy who was glad to see and be with his Daddy?”

“Go away,” I said.

“You see. You’re losing this argument. That’s another thing about you. You don’t like to lose. You expect to win at everything. You think you can take care of everyone, fool everyone, and when you can’t, you don’t think you have a right to live. It makes me very angry.” To my amazement, she actually shook her fist at me, then released her grip and ran the hand through her tangled, dull brown hair, the same muddy color of her eyes. One mass of it was left stranded in the air as though a breeze were blowing, although the room was hot, its air stale. “I can’t treat you. Lookit, I know why you lied about your father. I’m supposed to lead you to it gradually, but you probably know that.”

I nodded.

“You say in your letter after Halston began treatment you read many books on psychology?”

“I read some.”

“Some. I bet you read plenty. So you know the technique?”

I nodded.

“You know why I think you did that?”

I shut my eyes.

“So you could win, so you could defeat Halston, even if winning meant beating yourself.”