Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil (103 page)

“Un huh.” Stick leaned back, his cruel face dissolving into a shadow. “Now you just kick nice and easy and get used to the water. When you’re relaxed, you let go and swim. The most important thing is not to be afraid to put your face in the water. If you need to breathe, you just turn your head to the side.” He pantomimed the actions, a shadow turning its head to the side. He brought an arm up and said, “You bring your arm through the water, keeping your fingers cupped … All the way through and back. Try to keep your elbow high.” He stopped the demonstration, sat facing me, and leaned toward me. He pulled gently, teasing me, lifting the index finger of my right hand. “Why don’t you let go with one hand?”

I didn’t react to his sadism. I flexed my leg gradually to see if I could move it enough to avoid the paralyzing contractions. I had roughly fifty percent mobility. If I could remember not to extend it fully, I might be able to swim.

He pulled my middle finger off and then whacked the remaining digits. I was stretched away from the boat, clinging with only the tips of my left hand. I put my right arm into the water, through and out. “See?” I said. “I can swim.”

“Just one more and you’re there,” he said. He pulled at the pinky of my left hand.

I twisted to look. We were nearer to the east shore.

Stick pried off another finger.

“Stick, are you paying attention to yourself—”

“Keep moving your arm,” he pulled at the middle finger.

“You’re excited,” I said. Water slid into my mouth. I spit it out. “Do you have an erection?”

He smashed my left hand and I slipped down. I sank without a struggle. I couldn’t risk flailing for effect with my crippled leg. We were deep, he hadn’t made a mistake about that. Well before I felt the bottom, I rolled onto my left side, keeping my half-bent right leg still, using a side stroke to propel me beneath the boat. I hoped—the pond was too dark to see through for orientation. Something, I was sure it was a fish, slithered along my chest. I hadn’t had time to gasp air, but I wanted to swim underwater for as long as possible.

My lungs ached while I repeated in my brain, over and over, “Don’t use your right leg.” When I surfaced smoothly, I rolled onto my back. I had succeeded in passing underneath the boat and beyond it toward the east shore. The pond was quiet for a while and then I heard a big splash, followed by more noise of someone moving in the water. Stick called, “Rafe!” A moment later the rowboat groaned and I heard him grunt. I assumed that he was climbing back in.

I floated with only my eyes and mouth out of the water, arms stroking well below the surface, in no hurry to reach safety.

Finally my right foot felt the bottom and I eased myself quietly into shallow water until I could lean on my arms and lift my head enough to look across the pond.

Stick was crouched in the rowboat, facing the other way, peering at the black surface. He had an oar dipped into the water, moving it slowly back and forth. He called, “Rafe!” abruptly. I started, thinking he knew I was alive. But he didn’t. He continued to stare intently where I had disappeared. In a little while, he said it again, “Rafe?” only this time he made a sad sound.

Since his back was to me I rose and quickly moved onto the shore. At the noise of my breaking the water, Stick turned. I was in the shadow of the woods by then.

“Rafe?” he called, this time with a desperate hope.

I slid behind the trees and waited, rubbing my right leg until I could stretch it out. Stick shifted to the side of the boat facing me and dove into the water. While he was submerged, I hurried through the evergreens. When I had run half the distance to the cabin, I stopped, peering toward the pond. I couldn’t see through to make out what Stick was up to.

I maneuvered to bring myself out at the back of the cabin, carefully placing one foot after another with gentle pressure to keep the crackling forest quiet. I heard faint sounds that could have been Stick rowing on the pond. I was shivering by then.

I entered the cabin through the rear door and found the towels in a cabinet where I had stored them the night before, when I first decided to provide Stick with an opportunity to teach me how to swim. Through the window I saw Stick rowing slowly to shore. Before he reached it, I crossed to the pond side of the cabin and opened that door halfway. I maneuvered beside the frame, inside, out of sight.

I couldn’t see his face as his boat came to a rest on the sand. He got out, moving very slowly, as if every bone in his body ached. He was wet. His slumped shoulders trembled uncontrollably. He faced the pond and stood there, shivering, looking at the still water.

I stepped into the open doorway and onto the porch. He didn’t hear the squishy noise of my feet in the drenched sneakers. I waited for him to turn.

He made a noise through his teeth and dropped slowly to his knees. He must have crossed his arms because a hand appeared on each shoulder. He cried out, “Rafe!” with rage and then bent forward all the way until his head touched the earth.

The trees echoed with his cry. In the ringing aftermath, I answered calmly, “Are you sorry, Stick?”

“Ah!” he screamed and rolled to the ground.

I ran up to him as he tried to right himself. I bent over him as he scrambled, crawling from me. I said into his terrified face, “That’s who you are!” I pointed to the black water. “That’s you! That’s the real man!”

“No!” He kicked at me with both legs, backing away on his elbows and his ass, so scared he pushed himself into the pond.

I kept pace, stepping between his legs, finally bending down to say, “What are you?”

“I didn’t mean—I tried to—”

“What are you!” I shouted into his trembling mouth.

“I’m bad!” he cried out desperately and shook his head from side to side as if he were denying his own testimony, but he wasn’t. He was rapturously feeling the truth of it. “I’m bad,” he called again, this time to the dark sky.

“You’re dangerous,” I told him.

He gasped and shut his mouth. He looked at me meekly.

“Aren’t you?” I asked softly.

Water lapped at his chest. He asked cautiously, “Are you alive?”

“That doesn’t matter, Stick. You murdered me whether I’m alive or not.”

His chin trembled and at last the miracle happened. He cried. Like a scared boy, he blubbered, “I’m bad.”

“Yes,” I agreed.

His chest quaked and he sobbed again. “I’m bad,” he said in a high little voice.

“You want to hurt people.”

He nodded his head up and down and sniffled.

“We’re going to have to watch you, watch you very carefully.”

He nodded. I offered a hand. He took it. I pulled him up. There was a rank smell coming from him, the smell of a frightened animal.

“There was no danger here tonight from me, Stick. I can’t do anything to hurt you. Do you understand?”

“I think so,” he said in a whisper.

“There was no danger except from you.”

“I know,” he said in a little voice.

“I have a towel for you.” I turned my back and went to the porch. I brought him a dry towel. He hadn’t moved, he was still in two feet of water. “Come on out,” I coaxed.

He walked to me, arms folded across his chest, shivering and sniffling. I put the towel around his shoulder. He hugged it. He lowered his head and whispered, “I’m sorry.”

“You’re not sorry, Stick, you’re just scared. I’ll ask you again. What are you?”

He rubbed his wet face with a corner of the towel and took a deep breath. He looked at me frankly. “I’m bad,” he said calmly.

“Okay,” I told him. “At least that’s a start.”

C
HAPTER
F
OURTEEN
The Last Conflict

A
FTER THE NIGHT ON THE POND, THERE REMAINED ONE OBSTACLE FOR ME
to surmount with Halley, and I knew months, perhaps years, might pass before the time came to face it.

Stick’s progress was smooth. Three months later, he drove Mary Catharine to an AA meeting. He waited outside to take her home—and to make sure she sat through it. Centaur was a great success. Stick put what would have been Gene’s bonus into a trust fund for Pete Kenny. Under Andy Chen’s supervision (he was named VP in charge of product development), Tim and Jonathan inaugurated a software line that, as of this writing (summer 1994), became Minotaur’s most profitable division, protecting it from the laptop and PC price-cutting catastrophes of the past two years. Today, Jack Truman is manager of the company. Theodore Copley, although still its titular head and owner, functions as a consultant, approving future plans, representing Minotaur to its board and the public at large. He keeps himself aloof from day-to-day personnel decisions. This is entirely voluntary on his part. He wishes to avoid the temptation to hurt people.

The night I “drowned”—we did have dinner in his room—and during many more conversations over the following months, I learned that his childhood and adolescence had been a series of cruelties similar to the story of how he was taught to swim. He remembered the details gradually. Part of his adaptation (a copy of neurosis and another proof that his condition qualifies as a disorder) had been to repress the memories. My assumption that his father taunted him about his sexuality had been correct. He was called girlie if he dropped a ball or reacted with pain to a fall—both commonplace taunts. He was savagely teased for being a little fat boy, also a cliché. A less well known sadism to me, although I had intuited this wound, was his father’s snide remarks about the size of his prepubescent penis. A particularly traumatic event occurred when Stick was six. His father observed him walking hand in hand with his closest male friend and forbade him from seeing the boy ever again because, “they were acting like little fags.” (Stick didn’t know what that meant. He found out during adolescence when the implication was especially upsetting.) Although his father slapped his mother on a regular basis, he was rarely hit. Stick recalled two spankings and a vicious punch in the stomach and his father’s most brutal language was always delivered in private. I can’t say the abuse was severe or that unusual for a man of his generation. Perhaps the disguised nature of his father’s sadism, its apparent respectability, was what made Stick’s successful adaptation possible. After Stick admitted to himself he was afraid he was homosexual, he was able to discover he wasn’t, and there followed great relief, a relief that allowed him to give up some of his sadistic impulses, in particular toward his wife and daughter.

I don’t mean to imply that Stick was cured. For one thing, a complete “cure” of emotional conflict seems to me an illusion that blinds itself both to the power of instinct and the real world. Stick was born with an aggressive, selfish nature that cannot be fundamentally altered and we live in a society that, despite its public claims, admires and rewards ruthless individual behavior. What was accomplished was the creation of self-consciousness. Guilt, some might call it, although I believe the result with Stick is closer to the idea implicit in the word responsibility. He came to understand that his resistance to pain and loneliness, his relish of competition, is not shared by many. He learned patience in the face of the simple although annoying truth that most people who are thrown into cold water sink rather than swim.

Halley’s “cure” seemed to proceed, if at all, with the stubbornness of normal therapy. Six months after the fall retreat, by the time Stick severed his end of their metaphorical incest, she had already transferred her fixation to me. Under the guise of reporting what Gene, Jack, Didier (and others) felt about his management, she used to give Stick explicit accounts of her lovemaking. To make clear what has already been implied, since our “games” were satisfying her Electra complex, she stopped that behavior after our first encounter. Nevertheless, in April of 1992, when Stick told her he no longer wanted to hear about her affairs, she was rocked.

She hunted for me immediately, although it was during work hours, something she avoided. (She concealed our intimacy from others, just as she had pretended not to be friendly with her father.) She found me out back, watching the work on the new recreational area. They were laying a full basketball court, putting up a volleyball net on the grass, and carving a true running path for jogging enthusiasts.

I was on the grass, under the new volleyball net, watching as they put down a layer of blacktop for the basketball court. The smell had driven all but the workmen away. Halley appeared in a navy blue suit and high heels. She had to circle around to reach me. Her right foot gave out on the soft earth at the border and she twisted her ankle slightly. She kicked off her shoe angrily, bent over and rubbed. I got up and went to her. “Did you hurt yourself?”

I was astonished when she turned her face to me. There were tears in her black eyes, the first I had ever seen. “You know I’m not all right.” She tried to walk, stumbled because the other foot was still in a high heel shoe. She kicked that one off too. Her stocking feet were getting dirty.

“Here,” I said, putting an arm around her. “I’ll help you onto the grass.”

“You can’t do this,” she said bitterly and I knew she didn’t mean my physical act of charity. “Do what?”

“You know.” She hopped while I held her. We reached the grass and I helped her sit down. She brushed dirt off the bottom of her feet. “Get my shoes,” she said, glancing up. She squinted against the tears. Her mouth was tight as if she were also fighting unhappy words. “I’m going to quit. If he thinks I won’t, he’s kidding himself.”

I fetched her shoes. She checked the heel of the one she had twisted. It was all right. “I really don’t know what you’re talking about,” I told her.

“He—” she nodded at the top floor of the Glass Tower, “he doesn’t want to hear my, quote unquote gossip, anymore.” She stared at the machine while it rolled over steaming tar. Perhaps inspired, she shut her eyes, squeezing back the tears. “He doesn’t even know I’ve already stopped telling him.”

“Yes he does.”

She frowned at my interruption and ignored it. “He said if I have anything to tell him I should do it in the Friday marketing meeting.” She played one of her notes of feeling. There was a sad chord to its bitterness. “Fuck him. I can
get
another job like
that.”
She snapped her fingers.