Rafael Yglesias - Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil

“After you see the message, you wake up?”

Gene nodded. “They’re connected,” he said in a mumble. “I wonder how many times I’ve had this dream.”

“Me too,” I said.

Gene smiled. “Aren’t you supposed to know?”

Again the hostility at my all-knowingness. I had failed him — that was the message. But he couldn’t say it straight out and the judgment was uncertain or else why had he returned to see me? Unless he had come for a refund. “No,” I said. “You know everything. There’s only one expert on Gene Kenny and you’re it.”

“Then I’m in deep shit.” Gene sat forward, lowered his head and rubbed his cheeks, pulling the skin down so I saw more of his red, exhausted eyes.

“Are you under a lot of pressure now?”

“Yeah, that’s why I took the job.”

“You took the job to be under pressure?”

“No, no.” He was impatient. “That’s stupid,” he said. He looked up abruptly, shocked at himself. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. I don’t mean you’re stupid. That’s one of my problems. I keep snapping at people. Saying things I mean.” He snorted. “I mean, saying things I don’t mean.” He banged the side of his head with his right palm. “I’ve gotta get some sleep.” Now he looked at me, imploringly, a child asking for desert. “My wife thinks I should get some sleeping pills.”

“Let’s go through a typical day, Gene. Let’s go through your schedule.” I had to coax him into taking this inventory seriously. He repeatedly tried to summarize. His summaries, when we tracked each hour carefully, turned out to be wrong. He felt he was selfishly wasting time. In fact, Gene was busy at work (I couldn’t judge then how productively) and always doing things for other people. His wife complained so often and repeatedly of how early their son, Peter, woke up that Gene took it upon himself to rise with him, usually about six A.M. Gene made breakfast for Peter, dressed him for school, packed his school bag, made his bed (although there was a cleaning woman who came two times a week), and brought a cup of coffee to his wife before leaving for his office at seven-thirty. There he worked without a break — often without lunch — until at least six in the evening. During crunch time he would work until midnight. That period would be coming up in a year or so on the new machine — Black Dragon was its in-house nickname. On Flash II, working right through until dawn was common. When he came home, he summarized that he did nothing but sit around like a zombie. Zombie was his word. In fact, he cleaned up the dinner dishes, gave Peter a bath and played a game with him, read him bedtime stories, and then returned to studying specs or other matters related to work.

“When do you make love?” I asked.

This question made him apprehensive. His legs crossed defensively; hands also covered the region. [Some therapists would have made much of the instant armoring of his genitals; but these movements are routine, exhibited by many people in an awkward interview. I note them and consider them significant only when I detect a distinctive pattern, such as Gene’s unwillingness to look directly into people’s eyes.] His face opened, eyes wide, the skin smoothing. He seemed more boyish and ashamed than usual. “Well, you know, it’s hard. We can’t do it until Peter falls asleep and my wife often falls asleep before he does or she gets too tired. Pete doesn’t sleep much and he wakes up a lot. He comes into our bedroom around one or one-thirty almost every night.”

“Every night?”

It turned out that Pete came into their bedroom perhaps twice a week. Gene said he lived in dread of Peter discovering them making love. Dread was his word.

“Doesn’t your door lock?” I asked.

“Yeah …” Gene didn’t seem to think that made much difference. “But he would hear,” Gene finally said when I pressed him on this point.

“Do you think Pete knows that you and Cathy have sex?” I asked.

The question flabbergasted him. His mouth opened. He gestured to my shelves as if someone were standing behind me, also amazed. “I … I…” He made some sort of noise. “I don’t think so. It never occurred to me — I mean, not while I was a child.”

“What never occurred to you?”

“That my parents … You know, that they …” He seemed to blush. Or, at least, to be embarrassed.

“You walked in on your parents making love, Gene. Or at least, you walked in on your father kissing your mother’s breasts.”

“I did?” he said, astounded. His voice was full of wonder. His eyes trailed up to my ceiling, mouth open. “I did,” he confirmed it. He looked at me suddenly, intent. “How did you know?”

“You told me.” I waved a hand. “It’s no trick, Gene. I reviewed my notes on our sessions. You told me years ago that in the old loft — remember there was no lock on your parents’ door …?”

“Yeah, it was a sliding door.”

“Right. You had a bad dream, about a spider, and you went into your parents’ room. It was very dark, but there was a shaft of light from the street lamps that fell across your parents’ bed.”

“Right,” he was nodding, eyes unfocused, looking into the past. “Right. And I thought Dad was biting Mom.”

“Do you remember what happened?”

“She saw me.”

“That’s what you told me.

“She saw me and I left.”

“Is that all you remember?”

“Dad yelled at me?” he guessed.

I said nothing.

“That’s wrong?” Gene asked plaintively.

[Of course there is no right or wrong. His current memory didn’t jibe with what he told me before, but that didn’t mean he was now wrong in the psychological sense. The memory is just as important in how it is wrongly remembered. For us, facts are not the truth — that’s why we often find the law to be frustrating and unjust.]

“Gene, I’ve already run ten minutes past the hour and this is complicated, so—”

Gene got to his feet quickly, mumbling while I explained, “Oh, okay, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” I said sharply.

He froze and stared at me. His thick eyebrows lifted, quizzical.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m frustrated I don’t have more time. Gene, that’s going to be a problem if you want to keep seeing me. My schedule is loaded and inflexible. In fact I only have my lunch hours free and I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to skip lunch that often. I really can’t see you more than two times a week. I hope that’s not too little.”

“Yeah, I understand. It’s the kids who really need help. You can’t waste time listening to me whine.”

“Gene, to be accurate, you haven’t whined until now.”

“Oh, I was just kidding.”

“It sounded to me like a disguised complaint. It isn’t that I think the children need me more, or that I value you less, it’s just that I’ve promised my time to them already and I’m not a superman. I can’t go without eating or without a break more than twice a week.”

[The above is a violation of barriers. I was asking Gene to see me as an ordinary human being, which — according to the transference theory — is impossible and, more to the point, undesirable. I did it deliberately. I hadn’t lost my temper. I had decided if I was going to work with him, a new approach was called for. I believed Gene was stuck, or rather, in love with being a boy, staying safe in his timidity and lack of demands. To once again accept a role as his substitute parent would be counterproductive, I believed, no matter how theoretically correct.]

“I’m sorry,” Gene said.

“No, you’re not,” I said mildly. That took him aback. “How about Friday, same time?” Gene nodded slowly, still in shock at my blunt tone. “Do you know your way out?” He rose, groaning, as if his muscles were sore. By now the van from the South Bronx with my group of five foster care teenagers should have arrived. The courts had removed these adolescents from their homes into an almost equally bad system. They had horrendous problems: they were severely abused by their families and surrogates, their schools were inadequate and they lived in dangerous neighborhoods, surrounded by crack addicts. Their economic and emotional prospects were virtually terminal. Gene was right. I did disdain his middle-class complaints to some extent. And yet I understood that emotions don’t exist in a relative universe: Gene’s pain from the splinters in his toes might as well be shafts of steel in his heart. Pain is all-encompassing to us. No one can be proven to be better off than others; they can only feel better off. Pointing out to Gene that his life was comparatively easy would merely add guilt to his woes — that is religion’s failure. And yet indulging his childishness would keep him forever seeing only the imagined monsters in the shadows and not the joyful daylight everywhere else — that is traditional therapy’s failure.