Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil Read Online Free PDF Page A

and he coughed.
    “Relax, Papa,” my mother said nervously. She reached out to touch the plaid blanket covering her father’s chest. It trembled with each cough.
    “Can’t—” he said. The green changed to a duskier color—purple. “Can’t—” he tried to say again. He looked as if he were being flooded with blood under the skin, drowning from the inside out.
    “Get the nurse,” Ruth said to me. Then she changed her mind. “Wait,” she said, holding my arm. I don’t know if she saw fear on my face. Perhaps it wasn’t what she saw; she could have realized an eight-year-old was a poor emissary. Leaving me alone with the sick man wasn’t acceptable either. Both choices were bad. She decided not to spare me, but to find help for her father as quickly as possible. “I’ll get her. Stay with Papa,” she said and ran out before I had a chance to react.
    I was alone with a dying man. Grandfather couldn’t produce any sound other than a gurgling struggle to speak. His eyes were wild with fear. He reached for his constricted throat and pulled at the invisible strangler’s grip.
    His chest jerked as if he were being electrocuted. I put my hand on top of the plaid blanket, at the epicenter of his torsos earthquake. I didn’t look at his choked face. I stared at my hand and thought very hard: Get better, Papa. I wished for a healing bolt to flow through my arms and into my palm; I willed it to soothe Papa’s wounded chest. Get better, Papa, I thought, beaming the magic power, wishing with all my heart to heal him.
    After a moment, Papa’s hands covered mine. The long bones of his fingers, although they looked fragile, pressed down hard on my palm.
    Get better, I sung silently to his hand.
    Papa pushed harder and harder on my little hand. I was horrified at what he was doing. I thought he was going to push it right through his chest. I pictured my fingers falling inside and touching his blood and heart and my vague idea of what else would be inside a human being. And then he released the pressure.
    “Oh, that’s better,” he said in a clearer voice than I had yet heard from him.
    The nurse, my mother, and Uncle Bernie appeared. I looked at my grandfather. His skin was back to normal. His eyes were no longer dead; they shined at me. And he continued to hold my hand against his chest; but now lightly, the way someone would caress a favorite object.
    The adults fussed and questioned him.
    “I was dying and the Little Gentleman saved me,” Papa said, but in a lilting, jocular intonation.
    My mother, in fact, took Papa seriously. She hugged me, asked if I had been scared. I said no. She explained to me almost apologetically and fearfully, as if I were a stern boss, that she had gone instead of me because she could find the nurse faster.
    “No, no, I’m fine,” Papa was saying to the nurse, who hadn’t accepted his reassurances. “I couldn’t get my breathing for a second. It was nothing. Forget it. Go away.” He waved energetically and struggled to lift himself higher on the bed.
    “You want to sit, Mr. Rabinowitz?” the nurse asked. She arranged his pillows so they would prop up his head.
    When she tried to rearrange his blanket, he held it down firmly and said, “Stop. I want that—leave me alone. Everybody but my grandson—go. Right, Bernie?”
    Uncle agreed with a nod. He took my mother’s hand affectionately. She reacted with a startled look and then smiled. Uncle tugged her toward the door.
    “Go,” Papa said to the nurse. “Have your coffee.” He encouraged my mother, “Go. I’ll send your boy out to you.”
    “Okay?” my mother asked me softly.
    “Yeah,” I answered honestly. My fear of the old man’s decay—and of the relentless presence waiting for him—was gone. Besides, I liked being called the Little Gentleman. I preferred to stay in the ordinary room (much more like the rooms in Washington Heights) with this relative who approved of me. Who had, moreover, some use for me