Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil (93 page)

“The narcissist is Halley.”

Diane shook her head, bewildered. “Halley?”

“My former patient, Gene Kenny? She’s the woman he left his wife for. And the sadist, her father, was his boss.”

“Was
his boss?”

“You don’t know,” I said, realizing my mistake. “It was after we split up.”

“Split up? Is that how you think of it? Jesus Christ. That’s a masterpiece of understatement.” She pressed her cigarette out. “Wait a minute.” She twisted and tried to slide the ashtray onto her desk. “What the hell—” she couldn’t reach, so she stood up to put it there while talking, “—are you doing? Making contact with a patient’s—?”

“He’s dead,” I said. “He killed his wife and committed suicide two months ago.”

Diane sat on the edge of her desk. She gaped at me. “No.”

“Halley dumped him. Copley, her father, fired him two weeks later. His wife was threatening to move out of state with their son. He had no job and lost their one asset, the house. Well, Gene didn’t know the house was gone. I’m not sure exactly what happened, but …” I waved a hand in disgust. “That’s bullshit. I know exactly what happened. Copley and Halley had decided Gene was getting too big for his britches. He was asking for a piece of the company and he had the loyalty of the whole creative team. They had a new kid genius Copley thought could replace him. Between the two of them, they knew Gene’s situation, they knew how to make it as bad as possible, because just beating him down wasn’t enough. What if he went to a competitor? Although, that wasn’t it. What they did wasn’t practical—that wasn’t the real reason. What they did had the vicious irrationality of madness.” I was talking to myself, I realized. I tried to focus on Diane’s blank, still-amazed face. “That night, the night he murdered Cathy and killed himself, that was the night Gene realized how much they wanted to hurt him. Cathy confronted him with a letter calling in the loan on the house, exposing the fact that he’d been fired, that he had no way of stopping her from moving, and that he couldn’t meet the next support payments. In a flash he understood Halley was in a league with her father, he understood that for years his life had been an elaborate con game, that he had thrown away his marriage, his child, and his career for nothing. He was a fool as far as they were concerned, a ridiculous man. All his life he had lived in fear of making demands and pushed him past that fear. I cured him.” I laughed bitterly. Diane was staring at the carpet, kneading an eyebrow. “I told him if he asserted himself with his boss, he’d be rewarded for his years of service. I told him his fears that Halley didn’t love him were neurotic. I not only sent him into a battle he wasn’t fit for, worst of all, I stripped away his one puny defense, his tortoise shell. He was safe. Don’t you see? Diane, are you listening?” She looked up. “He wasn’t getting what he was worth at the company because he knew, instinctively, that kept him safe. He didn’t allow himself to fall in love with a beautiful, self-assured woman like Halley because he knew he couldn’t survive her rejection. He didn’t defy his wife because he knew he couldn’t survive her anger. He was miserable, sure. He was being taken advantage of, sure. But he was safe.”

Diane pushed off from her desk. She returned to the chair, pulled her legs under her, and sat on her haunches. “It didn’t make sense to you, so you arranged to meet them, is that what happened?”

“You’re wearing contacts,” I said. “That’s why you look so different.”

“Yes! Yes, you got it. I’m on the prowl. I want everything to be different. I don’t want anything to remind me of you. Not even when I look in the mirror.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, yeah, you’re real sorry. What do you want me to say? That you’re responsible for Gene’s suicide? That you shouldn’t cure neurotics because maybe their illness protects them?”

“Yes. Say that, if that’s what you think it means.”

“Jesus,” Diane whispered to herself. “This is your insane perfectionism. Your God-complex.”

“Are you saying you don’t think what I’ve discovered is true? Copley and his daughter are mentally ill. If you believe the DSM III, if you believe everybody from Jesus to Freud to Phil Donahue, these people are sick. They should be miserable, they should be—”

Diane kicked out her legs and stood up. “They’re mean. That’s all. They’re shitty people. Deal with it. Grow up.” She waved at the door. “Go!” I didn’t move. She stamped her foot. “I can’t believe you came here to talk to me about this crap! That can’t be why you’re here. I don’t think this is my vanity talking. You can’t be here to talk about these creeps.”

“Diane! Goddamnit! Listen to me!” She backed away, startled. Had I yelled that loudly?
I
was on my feet, I realized, and I was advancing on her. I swallowed, took a breath and also stepped away from her. I made an effort to speak calmly. “You have a first-rate mind. Use it. Reach for something bigger than just mechanistic technique.” She breathed through her nostrils, her arms crossed protectively; but her eyes were waiting, prepared to listen. So I continued, “We divide the world into two groups—the well-adjusted and the dysfunctional. These people aren’t serial killers. They’re not sociopaths. On the contrary, they honor society and society honors them. They are well-adjusted but they have none of the healthy relationships that all the theorists maintain are the basis of being well-adjusted. No real love to sustain them, no true intimacy. And yet they function. They function at a high level. What do we call their psychological condition? We don’t have a category for it.”

Diane’s shoulders slumped. Her arms uncrossed and drooped. She shut her eyes. “Sure we do.”

“We do?” I was encouraged. Her tired voice meant she was taking me seriously.

Diane leaned against her desk and rubbed her eyes. I whispered, “Are you going to tell me?”

She uncovered her eyes. They were red and she looked at me hopelessly. Despite the forceful words, her voice was enervated. “I’ll tell you, if you promise you won’t debate it. That after you hear what I think, whether you agree or not, you’ll
get the
fuck out of my office, you’ll get the fuck out of my clinic, and you’ll get the fuck out of my life.”

So that was the price. I didn’t understand her equation. And I didn’t care, as long as I got to hear its sum. “I promise.”

“This is really what I think. Ph.D. and all.”

“Okay.” I felt profoundly relieved. No matter what she said, I would have something, something I could take with me. Something to discard or accept—that didn’t matter—I would have something to anchor me again to the world.

Diane said, “We’ve had a word for it from the beginning of human history. What you’re describing—these self-serving, heartless, destructive and perfectly respectable people—they’re evil. And there’s not a goddamn thing we can do about them.”

C
HAPTER
T
EN
The Banality of Evil

S
TICK PROVIDED THE ANSWER.
I
DISAPPEARED FROM
M
INOTAUR FOR
three days, leaving a message with Laura that I couldn’t make the tennis date, offering no explanation. I retreated to Baltimore. From there, I checked on Pete Kenny, who, according to David Cox, the child psychologist in Arizona, was doing better than expected.

“Perhaps he’s strong,” I said.

“Well, I guess that’s part of it …” Cox reacted to my comment doubtfully. “He’s getting a lot out of the sessions. He’s articulate about his feelings, about how much he misses his Mommy and Daddy. Also, his grandmother is very loving. Not smart, but loving.”

“He needs inner strength,” I insisted. “He needs your help, of course, and he’s fortunate his grandmother is doing her job, but, in the end, unless he’s strong that won’t be enough.” I told him I would pay Pete’s bills even if he doubled him to four sessions a week and that he should continue to tell Grandma the therapy was free.

For three days I focused on the new problem Diane’s remark had defined for me. She had used the word evil as a form of surrender: less a description than a pejorative; not a diagnosis, but a despairing judgment. She had been clever and helpful in not applying it to the obviously ill or sociopathic: serial killers, rapists, child abusers. She had been right to reserve evil for Stick and Halley, my sane, respectable and thoroughly legal twosome, as opposed to everybody’s favorite target for the appellation: monster tyrants of history. Hitler and Stalin are the prime examples of our century, although humanity has provided a constant supply, and our century has many more than merely that dynamic duo. But Hitler and Stalin, from all reports, were profoundly unhappy men. Only a willfully blind psychiatrist would declare them to have lived in homeostasis. There is a simple measurement that can be taken: Hitler and Stalin were less content and more paranoid as their power grew. Their appetites increased by what they fed on, craving more enemies and more killings to maintain the same level of comfort, rejecting opportunity after opportunity to preserve themselves and their power, destroying not only those who opposed them, but those who longed to help them. They were obviously ill. The question is, what do we call the hundreds, indeed hundreds of thousands of people, who obeyed fervently and worked passionately to help them? The Silent Majority? The Good Germans? Stalinists? Conformists? I don’t mean concentration camp guards or Bebe Rebozo. I don’t mean those who did wrong and looked the other way for the base purpose of gain or survival. I mean those who were happy to live in an unjust world, who function as well under Hitler as they do under Bill Clinton.

The presence of harmful function without anxiety or disorder, without stress on personality or mood—to call that psychological condition evil is not merely a judgment. It is a clear description and supplies the missing piece to a puzzle of psychology. Many practitioners have noted that it isn’t unusual for a patient to emerge from therapy as a less likable person. That’s a hint there
is
such a thing as too successful an adaptation to emotional conflict. Freud’s essential view of human beings (and this, more than anything, is what provokes so much hostility to him) is that we are savage animals who require at least sublimation, if not repression, to prevent our unconscious desires from having sway. In his view, social adaptation restrains us from our true desires: to rip food from the mouths of our starving companions, to rape our neighbors’ wives, to kill our fathers, to worship the moon with blood on our fangs, to live for the satiation of our animal appetites, relishing the moment-to-moment satisfaction of our mouths and genitalia. Sometimes the bondage of these unacceptable instincts causes neurotic conflict (and supplies Woody Allen with comedy): the wish to sleep with your mother appearing as a fear of elevators; the longing to eat your father’s flesh surfacing as a horror of clams on the half-shell. Freud’s many reinterpreters adopted a less harsh understanding of human nature, allowing for kinder and more altruistic ids. But they still posit emotional conflict as the cause of psychological dysfunction.

That view of humanity is supposed to catch everyone, from Gene Kenny to Adolf Hitler, in the net of psychology. Not Stick and Halley Copley, however. They don’t appear on our radar because we don’t recognize their outline. They are not in conflict. The equation is one-sided: they don’t need love and victory, only victory; they don’t need peace and pleasure, only pleasure. Truly, this makes labeling them evil a definition, not a swear word to vent our disapproval.

But how to treat them? They would not volunteer and society does not see them as ill. Indeed, their absence of conflict, their freedom from neurosis, makes them attractive, drawing nervous moths to immolation in their brilliant fire.

Frankly, I was stuck. I became desperate enough by the third day that, while idly going over the new chapters prepared by Amy Glickstein on Joseph’s experimental neuroleptic drugs, I considered spiking Halley’s Evian or Copley’s herbal tea (he had recently given up caffeine) with a psychotropic. Perhaps an antidepressant would heighten their unnaturally low levels of anxiety. Perhaps drugging this natural Prozac pair with Prozac would push their legal acts of self-preservation into a murderous mania. Unfortunately, then I would be a poisoner, not a healer. I wouldn’t have proved they suffered from a psychological condition susceptible to cure, any more than I believed Joseph had cured depression by chemical manipulation.

Edgar Levin broke through the barricade of the Prager Institute’s switchboard and also my reverie. I hadn’t included him on the list of those to be told I wasn’t there. I could have declined the call anyway, but I was curious.

“Well, Rafe,” Edgar said to my hello. “I’ve got to hand it to you. I didn’t think anybody could make Stick Copley nervous and confused but you’ve done it.”

“And how have I managed this miracle?”

“Apparently he doesn’t know where the hell you are or why you’ve disappeared. I called him this morning to find out if you’d agreed to manage his retreat sessions. First he tried to fake it, but when I asked him to transfer me to you, out came the truth. So I called my brother in Hollywood and he called your cousin Julie to get your number.”

“Julie knew my number?”

“Yeah. Is that a surprise? So what’s the story? You got the info you wanted for your book and you’re outta there?”

“Just taking a break.”

“Do me a favor, okay? Either in or out. This is a businessman you’re dealing with. They think a yes is yes and a no is no. Subtlety’s not their strong point. He’s got to know if he can rely on you.”

“I see.” I lapsed into thought.

It must have been a long pause, because Edgar laughed and said, “Hey, Rafe! I’m a busy man. I’m the biggest boy on my block. You can’t keep me waiting on the phone. The American economy will collapse.”

“Whose idea was it, Edgar?”

“Idea?”

“I’m sorry. I mean, to ask me to lead this fall retreat thing? You or Stick?”

“I like the retreats. I like an intimate management team. Happy families and all that. But, and this is one of the reasons I think Stick is a good manager, the encounter group leaders at these places are pathetic. Stick thought you might come up with better techniques. If you do, I’ll package you on a video, and we’ll make infomercials. My brother can produce it—
Dr. Neruda’s Five Keys to Success.”