Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil (89 page)

As her excitement mounted, she raised a soapy hand, fingers probing for the lip of my shorts. I lifted them off disdainfully. “Keep your hands to yourself,” I said.

“Please,” she said in a whisper. “I’ll go if you don’t behave yourself,” I answered. “Have a bath with me, Daddy,” she moaned. I cupped her neck in my right palm and invaded her with the left hand. She planted her feet on either side of the faucet and arched her middle. “I can’t,” she pleaded. “I want you inside.”

I leaned over, pressing my cheek against hers, my mouth to her ear. “Let yourself go,” I whispered, my thumb on the quickening pulse in her throat to check on the work of my other hand. “I can’t like this,” she said desperately.

I watched shadows move across the amber light on the tile, learning the rhythm of this woman. Around once slow, quickly across. Side to side. Up and down. Pause. Hard on the nub … “Let me touch you,” she begged.

“No,” I said. Around and around. Pause. Depart. Let her think you’ve quit until her belly asks for more. Then fast and rougher.

Her warm dripping hand came up to grab my thigh. I stopped pleasing her, pulling her fingers from my skin, and pushed her hand into the water. “Lift your behind,” I said harshly. She obeyed. I pinned her hand beneath her. “You’re not clean yet,” I said.

“Let me kiss you,” she said, her lips blindly touching my face, searching for my mouth.

“Let go,” I said. I tightened my grip on her neck to keep her head still and searched with my middle finger for the pressure point at its base, applying a light but persistent touch. She relaxed, passive again. I resumed playing the instrument, stroking her thighs, stomach, and around her breasts before I returned to her sex.

My eyes adjusted to the amber light until even that seemed bright. I listened to the bubbles subside while she whispered, “I can’t … Please … I can’t. Please … Let me touch you.”

I took her earlobe between my teeth and bit lightly. I whispered, “But this isn’t for you, my little baby. This is what I want.”

“You want me like this?” she asked plaintively. I changed rhythm. She moaned in a deeper tone. “This is for me.”

She trembled, breathing rapidly as if she were having a fast and shallow orgasm. I didn’t believe in it. She was eager to be rid of the attention. “Oh God, oh God, oh God,” she said and then exhaled loudly to signal it was over. She whispered, “Thank you.”

“You’re a bad little girl,” I said. “Don’t try to fool Daddy.” I slid the tip of my pinky into her other, dry hole. She was startled, then curious. With the rest of my hand I continued to play the central chord, as if I were at work on the crescendo of a Beethoven sonata.

She looked surprised as she felt a true orgasm begin. Her reactions were quite different than during her mock ecstasy. She arched against both ends of the tub, body rigid, no breathing, then a sudden release, sagging down into the water and up again taut, an irregular undulation. She cycled that way more than a dozen times—fighting and losing, fighting and losing to herself.

As she surrendered to the climax, pushing against both rims, she levitated out of the water. When I believed the momentum was too strong for her to stop it, I whispered, “Gene loved you. He loved you so much he preferred to die than live without you.”

She turned her face to me, eyes glazed, listening hungrily while she grunted with pleasure. At the peak, as her body shuddered, her breaths deep, slow and long, I said, “He died for you.”

She bucked so violently I was drenched. I left the bathroom immediately.

I paused briefly in her living room to take another look at the eight-year-old copy of my book. I found what I was looking for on the inside of the back cover. I ignored her puzzled calls asking for me and left for my sublet. My clothes dried quickly on the hot streets.

C
HAPTER
E
IGHT
Last Chance

I
DIDN‘T RETURN THE MESSAGES
H
ALLEY LEFT DURING THE FOLLOWING
two days. She appeared in the lab—much to the surprise of my fellow geeks—on Wednesday morning and asked to see me in my office. “I want your opinion on the ad copy,” she said in public, namely in front of Andy Chen and two others standing nearby. “See if we’re brainwashing the consumer right,” she added with a smile. “I could use your expertise.”

Tim Gallent, the overweight debugger with a habit of screaming at Andy, said, “Whoa. No kidding, Doc. You brainwash people?”

“Every day,” I said. “I don’t have an office,” I told Halley.

“Come to mine.” She turned halfway, not sure if I would obey.

I didn’t seem to have a choice—how could I explain a rude refusal to Andy and the others? I tried a compromise. “Andy, may we use your office?” I asked.

“Mi casa es su casa,”
Andy said. He didn’t look happy. I’m sure he felt he had a right to see the ad copy for the machine he was building.

I led the way into Gene’s old office. The significance would be lost on her. I knew from Andy that Halley had been to the labs only once, her first week on the job, well before Gene had been promoted.

Still, Halley should have been impressed by my changes. At this point in my tenure, I had convinced Andy to allow the maintenance crews in to clean during the three days a week I was there, with a promise that I would supervise them. Andy trusted me to make sure the staff didn’t disturb work in progress. I arranged for them to vacuum and dust in two shifts, accommodating the odd hours of the technicians. I had dealt with the office furniture bureaucracy. The broken chairs and desks were replaced. I bought as many plants as the guys would tolerate. I convinced Stick that spies were unlikely to be crouched with binoculars in the woods across the road and thus the shades could be opened. I arranged with two of the cleaning staff—Rose and Fred—to do so each morning; the technicians couldn’t be trusted to remember. Since the windows had to remain shut, I was reduced to buying air filters and dehumidifiers, not without a lot of worry and memos from different divisions, including one called Technical Integrity, claiming that I was somehow going to destroy every microchip in the building. I found a lab in California which used the same method to freshen their sealed-air supply; that silenced Technical Integrity. So far, no disaster had occurred. Joe Stein’s mother would have been proud of me. The place still wasn’t spotless and it was far from beautiful, but the air was breathable, there was some light, and the leafy green plants were a reminder that the world has parts not made of metal and plastic.

As for Andy’s office, now the chess set, the prototype and his Black Dragon terminal rested on different tables. I brought in a separate desk for the rare occasions he used paper. I requisitioned a small refrigerator and stocked it with Coke. I discovered he liked apples and sharp cheddar cheese; a supply of both was maintained. Since Andy was a Michael Jordan fan, on the wall opposite his desk I hung a poster depicting the Chicago star making a twisting layup between two mammoth defenders.

Halley entered, ignorant of my domestic touches, opened a large manila envelope and pulled out several pages of elaborate typefaces. “These are rough,” she said. “I hate most of them. There’s one that may be it.”

“I don’t know a goddamn thing about advertising,” I said.

“You can read and you can react,” she said. “That’s all I need.”

I proved to her I had no feel for promotion. The one I liked (We made Centaur Fast, Flexible and Smart. All you have to do is make a Lap.) was among her least favorite. The leading candidate was—Don’t Take Your Troubles Home From The Office … Take The Solution.

“It’s banal,” I said. “And sort of pompous.”

Halley smiled as she returned the papers to the envelope. “Well, you’re right about one thing. We’re not there yet.” She closed the clasp. “Are you gay?” she asked casually. She brought her head up, in the style of a television detective, to catch my reaction.

I laughed. “That’s a little weak, Halley.”

“You just like to play mind games, is that it?”

“That’s my job.”

“What I want to know is—are they for your entertainment or mine?”

“It’s really quite simple, Halley. I meant to talk to you about it. Do you want to do that now?”

She looked at the pint-size refrigerator, at the Staunton chess pieces frozen in mid-game, and finally at the guts of the prototype, still a crashed mess of boards and wires. “Well, we could find a more romantic spot.” She smiled. “Or at least a bathroom.”

I checked my watch. “I have a meeting with your father in a half hour—”

“What was that shit you pulled—saying you love me?” she interrupted. The words were angry; her tone, however, was merely annoyed. “I mean,” she leaned one hand on Andy’s desk, the other on her hip, “especially for a brilliant psychiatrist, that was pretty primitive manipulation.”

“I do love you,” I said. Halley straightened, blinking at me. “But, unfortunately, you’re mentally ill and I’m not into that. I don’t have the shrinks disease of having relationships with potential patients. Not that I would treat you anyway.”

Halley’s lovely full lips, her pink lipstick iridescent against the tan, opened into a broad, amazed smile. She turned to the wall as if there were someone there to share her amusement. She came back to me, both hands on her hips, let out one of her noises of multiple feelings, and repeated with utter skepticism, “I’m mentally ill?”

“You’re a classic narcissist.”

“At least I’m a classic,” Halley mumbled.

I ignored her sarcasm. “I noticed you had one of Alice Miller’s books on your shelves, so I know you won’t misunderstand my use of the term. Almost nothing you do or say is genuine. You’re constantly making up personas to win the love of whomever you’re dealing with. Mostly, of course, you’re focused on men because of your unresolved incestuous desires for Stick. Quite a nickname for someone with your fixation. Both phallic and punitive.” I waved that digression away. “Your quest is hopeless, Halley—making yourself into the perfect fantasy for all these men to impress your father. What you really want, the only thing that will really satisfy you, is if Daddy falls in love with you. I guess you’re so far gone that you might even actually want him to fuck you. To feel him quaking in your arms, groaning in ecstasy, vulnerable and in your control. But that’s never going to happen. He doesn’t love you. He doesn’t love anyone. You said you were incapable of love, but you were really thinking of your father. You’re very much in love and he’s taking advantage of it. He’s got every man in Minotaur by the balls—so to speak—thanks to you. Of course that’s your murdered self all over again. The real Halley is dead—there are only pretty reflections to mesmerize us. You can’t get Daddy to fuck you, so you help him fuck others.”

Halley was still. She didn’t appear alarmed or upset. She nodded once or twice during my speech, not in agreement, to indicate she was following me. “I don’t want to fuck my father. I know why you think …” She smiled gently, as if regretting that she had to embarrass me. “I played along with your little fantasy because I thought—” She stopped, catching herself.

I finished for her, “Because you thought that would make me addicted to you—like Gene, like Jack, like who knows how many others. I knew that’s what you thought. But it wasn’t my fantasy, Halley. It was yours.” Once again, as she had so often, Halley surprised me with her will and her essential inner strength. There were many reactions she might have had—all of them genuine. There were many false reactions she might have chosen—all of them useless. Instead, she cocked her head, eyes brilliant, and asked coolly, “And what is
your
fantasy? You say I’m an expert at supplying them. So tell me, what do you like?”

I nodded, impressed. “You should have been a therapist. You always throw people back on themselves.” I felt this was my last chance to reach her. I walked over, resting my hands on her shoulders. I shook her gently. “Okay. No games. Listen to me. You can be helped. You’re very bright and you’re young. There’s really no limit to what you can accomplish. I know you must feel guilty, somewhere, about the harm you’ve caused, to your brother, to Gene, and possibly many others. But that really wasn’t in your control, although you think you’re in control all the time.” Halley listened to me, chin up to meet my eyes, lips shut, face impassive. I believed she was interested. I was convinced most of her, the best of her, wished to hear me. “I can get you the names of many good doctors. There’s nothing to be afraid of. You won’t be anybody’s fool. You won’t turn into a victim. You won’t be hurt and alone again, the way he made you feel as a little girl. You can find her—there’s a real Halley in there—and she’s even stronger than this one.”

She lifted her arm. That eased my hand off her shoulder. She touched my cheek with her fingers, stroking me. “You have a beautiful face,” she commented. “Tell me. Is that the same speech you made to Gene?” She backed away. There was not a trace of malice in her expression or in her voice. “I really don’t need help, Doctor. Maybe you’re right. Maybe I do terrible things. But they don’t make me feel terrible. I’m happy. And believe it or not, I can make you happy.” She waved the manila envelope gently for a goodbye. “Give me a call if you feel like learning to enjoy life,” she said and left.

I had no guide, no text I could follow after I took that risk and it failed. Twenty minutes later, the big door to Stick’s office whooshed open for me to enter. I had to be prepared for the possibility that Halley had reported my diagnosis to him, although I doubted she actually would. (Especially if I was on the money.) Still, if she did, what were the consequences? My position was untenable—I wanted to treat these people and they didn’t believe they were ill. Therapy depends on the patient desiring a cure. If I took Halley at her word (as you know, an Olympian feat for a shrink) I was sadly mistaken and she was a paragon of adjustment. My training, the accumulated knowledge of dozens of geniuses studying the human condition, had taught me she couldn’t be happy. Yet she functioned. There were no symptoms of distress. Settling into the black leather chair across from Stick’s country French table I had to allow for the possibility that she was right. I pronounced Gene cured and he committed suicide; I said she was mentally ill and she thrived. At what point did I have to admit that if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and looks like a duck, then, at the very least, it was going to be able to live its life as a duck?