Over the Edge

3

I GOT home at five forty-five. Robin was sleeping, so I sat in the living room and watched the sun wipe the tarnish from a sterling silver sky. By six-fifteen she was up and humming, draped in a wine-coloured kimono. I went into the bedroom, and we embraced. She drew away and cupped my chin with her hand. Taking in my unshaven face and rumpled clothes, she looked at me, incredulous.

"You've been up all this time!"

"I got back a few minutes ago."

"Oh, honey, you must be exhausted. What happened?"

"When I got there, he was gone. Escaped. I stayed for a while, hoping they'd find him."

"Escaped? How?"

"He knocked out his nurse, tied her up, and split. Probably went up into the foothills."

"That's spooky. Is this kid dangerous, Alex?"

"He could be," I admitted reluctantly. "The head nurse implied as much without coming out and saying so — told me the ward he was on was reserved for unpredictable patients. On the phone he was ranting about flesh eaters and reeking blades."

She shuddered. "I hope they find him soon.

"I'm sure they will. He couldn't get too far."

She began laying out her clothes. "I was going to make breakfast," she said, "but if you're beat, I can grab something in Venice."

"I'm not hungry, but I'll keep you company."

"You sure? You look awfully beat."

"Positive. I'll sleep after you leave."

She dressed for work in jeans, chambray shirt, crew-neck sweater, and Top-Siders, making the outfit look as elegant as an evening gown. Her long auburn-tinted hair has the kind of bouncy, soft curl obtainable only from nature. This morning she wore it loose, glossy ringlets tumbling over delicate shoulders; at work she would bunch it up under a cloth cap. All sixty-two inches of her moved with a liquid grace that never ceased to catch my eye. Looking at her, you'd never know she was an ace with a circular saw, but that was part of what had attracted me to her in the first place: strength and mastery in a totally feminine package, the ability to forge beauty amid the roar of lethal machinery. Even covered with sawdust, she was gorgeous.

She sprayed herself with something floral and kissed my chin. "Ouch. You need a sanding."

Arms around each other, we went into the kitchen.

"Sit," she ordered, and proceeded to prepare breakfast — bagels, marmalade, and a pot of decaffeinated Kona coffee. The room was sun-filled and warm, soon seasoned by the burgeoning aroma of the coffee. Robin laid out two place settings on the ash-burl trestle table she'd built last winter, and I carried the food in on a tray.

We sat opposite each other, sharing the view. A family of doves cooed and pecked on the terrace below. The gurgle of the fish pond was barely audible. Robin's heart-shaped face was lightly made up — just a trace of shadow over the eyes the colour of antique mahogany — the olive-tinted skin smooth and burnished by the last remnants of summer tan.

She spread marmalade on half a bagel with quick, sure strokes and offered it to me.

"No, thanks. Just coffee for now."

She ate slowly and with obvious pleasure, rosy, alert, and bristling with energy.

"You look raring to go," I said.

"Uh-huh," she replied between mouthfuls. "Got a big day. Bridge reset on Paco Valdez's concert box, finish a twelve-string, and get a mandolin ready for spraying. I'm gonna come home stinking of varnish."

"Great. I love a smelly woman."

She'd always been industrious and self-directed, but since returning from Tokyo, she'd been a dynamo. A Japanese musical conglomerate had offered her a lucrative position as a design supervisor, but after much deliberation she'd turned it down, knowing she preferred craftsmanship to mass production. The decision had renewed her dedication, and twelve-hour days at the Venice studio were becoming the rule.

"Hungry yet?" she asked, holding out another bagel half. I took it and chewed absently; for all I tasted it could have been warm modelling clay. I put it down and saw her shake her head and smile.

"Your lips are drooping, Alex."

"Sorry."

"Don't be. Just get yourself into bed, fella." She finished her coffee, stood, and began clearing the table. I retreated to the bedroom, peeling out of my clothes in transit. After drawing the drapes, I slunk between the sheets and lay on my back. I'd been staring at the ceiling for several minutes when she stuck her head in.

"Still up? I'm going now. Be back around seven. How about dinner out?"

"Sure."

"I have a craving for Indian. Does varnish go with tandoori chicken?"

"It does if you've got the right wine."

She laughed, fluffed her hair, came over, and kissed my forehead.

"Catch you later, sweetie."

After she left, I slept for a couple of hours. I awoke feeling fuzzy, but a shower and a glass of orange juice made me feel semi-human.

Dressed in jeans and a polo shirt, I went into the library to work. My desk was stacked with papers. It had never been like me to procrastinate, but I was still unaccustomed to being busy.

Three years earlier, at thirty-three, I'd fled burnout by retiring prematurely from the practice of psychology. My plan had been to loaf and live off investments indefinitely, but the leisurely life ended up being far more exciting — and bloody — than I could have known. One year and a reconstructed jaw later, I crawled out of my cave and began working part-time — accepting a few court-ordered custody evaluations and short-term consultations. Now, though still not ready for the commitment of long-term therapy cases, I'd increased my consult load to where I felt like a working-man again.

I stayed at the desk until one, finishing two reports to judges, then drove into Brentwood to have them typed, photocopied, and mailed. I stopped at a place on San Vicente for a sandwich and a beer and, while waiting for the food to arrive, used a pay phone to call Canyon Oaks. I asked the operator if Jamey Cadmus had been found yet, and she referred me to the day shift supervisor, who referred me to Mainwaring. His secretary told me he was in conference and wouldn't be available until late afternoon. I left my service number and asked him to return the call.

My table was near the window. I watched joggers in peacock-hued sweat suits huff along the grassy median and picked at my lunch. Leaving most of it on the plate, I paid the bill and drove back home.

Returning to the library, I unlocked one of the cabinets under the bookshelves. Inside were several cardboard cartons packed with the files of former patients. It took a while to find Jamey's — I'd vacated my office with haste, and the alphabetisation was haphazard — but soon I had it in my hands.

Sinking down in the old leather sofa, I began to read. As I turned the pages, the past materialised through the haze of data. Soon vague recollections began to take on shape and form; they rushed in noisily, like poltergeists, evoking a clamour of memories.

I'd met Jamey while consulting on a research study of highly gifted children conducted at UCLA. The woman who ran the grant had a thing about the genius-insanity stereotype: She was out to disprove it. The project emphasised intensive academic stimulation of its young subjects — college-level work for ten-year-olds, teenagers earning doctorates — and though critics charged that such super-acceleration was too stressful for tender minds, Sarita Flowers believed just the opposite: Boredom and mediocrity were the real threats to the kids' well-being. ("Feed the brain to keep it sane, Alex.") Certain that the data would support her hypothesis, she asked me to monitor the mental health of the whiz kids. For the most part, that meant casual rap groups and a counselling session now and then.

With Jamey it had evolved into something more.

I reviewed my notes from our first session and recalled how surprised I'd been when he showed up at my door wanting to talk. Of all the kids in the project, he'd seemed the least open, enduring group discussions with a distant look on his pale, round face, never volunteering information, responding to questions with shrugs and noncommittal grunts. Sometimes his detachment stretched to retreating between the pages of a volume of poetry while the others chattered precociously. I wondered, now, if those asocial tendencies had been a warning sign of things to come.

It had been a Friday — the day I spent on campus. I'd been examining test data in my temporary office when I heard the knock, soft and tentative.

In the time it took me to get to the door he'd backed away into the corridor, and now stood pressed against the wall as if trying to recede into the plaster. He was almost thirteen, but slightness of build and a baby face made him appear closer to ten. He wore a blue and red striped rugby shirt and dirty jeans and clutched a book bag stuffed so full the seams had spread. His black hair was worn long with the bangs cut ruler-straight. Prince Valiant style. His eyes were slate-coloured — blueberries floating in milk — and too large for a face that was soft and round and at odds with his skinny body.

He shifted his weight and stared at his sneakers.

"If you don't have time, forget it," he said.

"I have plenty of time, Jamey. Come on in."

He nibbled his upper lip and entered, standing back stiffly as I closed the door.

I smiled and offered him a seat. The office was small, and the options were limited. There was a musty, moth-eaten green couch of Freudian vintage on the other side of the desk and a scarred steel-framed chair perpendicular to it. He chose the couch, sitting next to his book bag and hugging it as if it were a lover. I took the chair and straddled it backwards.

"What can I do for you, Jamey?"

His eyes took off in flight, scanning every detail of the room, finally settling on the tables and graphs crowding the desk top.

"Data analysis?"

"That's right."

"Anything interesting?"

"Just numbers at this point. It'll be a while before patterns emerge — if there are any."

"Kind of reductionistic, don't you think?" he asked.

"In what way?"

He fidgeted with one of the straps on the book bag. "You know — testing us all the time, reducing us to numbers, and pretending the numbers tell the truth."

He leaned forward earnestly, suddenly intense. I didn't yet know why he'd come but was certain it hadn't been to discuss research design. A great deal of courage building had preceded the knock on my door, and no doubt, a rush of ambivalence had followed. For him the world of ideas was a safe place, a fortress against intrusive and disturbing feelings. I made no attempt to storm the fortress.

"How so, Jamey?"

He kept one hand on the book bag. The other waved like a pennant in a storm.

"Take IQ tests, for example. You pretend that the scores mean something, that they define genius or whatever it is we're supposed to be. Even the name of the study is reductionistic. 'Project 160'. Like anyone who doesn't score a hundred sixty on a Stanford-Binet can't be a genius? That's pretty lame! All the tests do is predict how well someone will do in school. They're unreliable, culturally biased and according to my reading, aren't even that good at predicting — thirty, maybe forty percent accuracy. Would you put your money on a horse that came in a third of the time? Might as well use a Ouija board!"

"You've been doing some research," I said, suppressing a smile.

He nodded gravely.

"When people do things to me, I like to understand what it is they're doing. I spent a few hours in the psych library." He looked at me challengingly. "Psychology's not much of a science, is it?"

"Some aspects are less scientific than others."

"You know what I think? Psychologists — ones like Dr. Flowers — like to translate ideas into numbers in order to look more scientific and impress people. But when you do that, you lose the essence, the" — he hugged at his bangs and searched for the right word — "the soul of what it is you're trying to understand."

"It's a good point," I said. "Psychologists themselves have been arguing about it for a long time."

He didn't seem to hear me and continued expounding in a high, child's voice.

"I mean, what about art — or poetry? How can you quantify poetry? By the number of verses? The metre? How many words end with e? Would that define or explain Chatterton or Shelley or Keats? That would be stupid. But psychologists think they can do the same kind of thing to people and come up with something meaningful."

He stopped, caught his breath, then went on.

"It seems to me that Dr. Flowers has a fetish for numbers. And machines. She loves her computers and her tachisto-scopes. Probably wishes we were mechanical, too. More predictable." He worried a cuticle. "Maybe it's because she herself needs contraptions to live a normal life. What do you think?"

"It's a theory."

His smile was mirthless.

"Yeah, I forgot. The two of you are partners in this. You have to defend her."

"Nope. When you guys talk to me, it's confidential. Test data — the numbers — go into the computer, but anything else stays out. If you're angry at Dr. Flowers and want to talk about it, go ahead."

He took his time digesting that.

"Nah, I'm not angry at her. I just think she's a sad lady. Didn't she used to be an athelete or something?"

"She was a figure skater. Won a gold medal at the 'sixty-four Olympics'."

He was silently pensive, and I knew he was struggling to visualise the transformation of Sarita Flowers from champion to cripple. When he spoke again, his eyes were wet.

"I guess that was a cruel thing to say — about her needing machines and all that."

"She's open about her disabilities," I said. "She wouldn't expect you to pretend they don't exist."

"But jeez, there I was going on about reductionism, and I went and did the same thing to her — pigeonholed her as a gadget freak because she walks with braces!"

He dug the nails of one hand into the palm of the other.

"Don't be too hard on yourself," I said gently. "Looking for simple answers is just one way we try to make sense out of a complicated world. You're a critical thinker, and you'll be all right. It's people who don't think who sink into bigotry."

That seemed to provide some comfort. His fingers relaxed and spread on whitened denim knees.

"That's an excellent point, Dr. Delaware."

"Thank you, Jamey."

"Uh, could I ask you one more thing about Dr. Flowers?"

"Sure."

"I don't understand her situation — her physical condition. Sometimes she seems pretty strong, almost normal. Last week I actually saw her take a couple of steps by herself. But a few months ago she looked really bad. Lake she'd aged years overnight and had no strength at all."

"Multiple sclerosis is a very unpredictable disease," I explained. "The symptoms can come and go."

"Is there any treatment for it?"

"No. Not yet."

"So she could get worse?"

"Yes. Or better. There's no way to know."

"That's hideous," he said. "Like living with a time bomb inside you."

I nodded.

"She copes with it by doing work she loves."

The water in the blue-grey eyes had pooled. A single tear rolled down one soft cheek. He grew self-conscious, wiped it away quickly with his sleeve, and turned to stare at a faded ochre wall.

He remained silent for a few moments, then sprang up, grabbing the book bag and hefting it over his shoulder.

"Was there anything else you wanted to talk about, Jamey?"

"No," he said, too quickly. "Nothing."

He walked to the door. I followed and placed a hand on his skinny shoulder. He was quivering like a pup whisked from the litter.

"I'm glad you came by," I said. "Please feel free to do it again. Anytime."

"Sure. Thanks."

He flung the door open and scurried away, footsteps echoing faintly down the high, arched corridor.

Three Fridays went by before he showed up again. The book bag was gone. In its place he lugged a graduate-level abnormal psychology text that he'd tagged in a dozen places with shreds of tissue paper.

Plopping down on the couch, he began flipping pages until he came to a frayed scrap of tissue.

"First," he announced, "I want to ask you about John Watson. From what I can gather the man was a total fascist."

We discussed behaviourism for an hour and a half. When I grew hungry, I asked him if he wanted something to eat, and he nodded. We left the office and walked across campus to the Coop. Between mouthfuls of cheeseburger and gulps of Dr. Pepper, he kept the dialectic going, moving sequentially from topic to topic, attacking each one as if it were an enemy to be vanquished. His mind was awesome, astounding in its ability to mine slag heaps of data and emerge with essential nuggets. It was as if his intellect had assumed an identity of its own, independent of the childish body in which it was housed; when he talked, I ceased to be aware of his age.

His questions came at me, as rapid and stinging as hailstones. He seemed to have barely assimilated one answer before a dozen new lines of inquiry had been formed. After a while I started to feel like a Sunday batter facing a pitching machine gone berserk. He fired away for a few minutes more, then, just as abruptly as he'd begun, ended the conversation.

"Good." He smiled with satisfaction. "I understand now."

"Great," I said, and exhaled wearily.

He filled half his plate with ketchup and dragged a bunch of soggy french fries through the scarlet swamp. Stuffing them in his mouth, he said:

"You're fairly intelligent, Dr. Delaware."

"Thank you, Jamey."

"When you were a kid, were you bored in school?"

"For the most part. I had a couple of teachers who were inspiring. The rest were pretty forgettable."

"Most people are. I've never really attended school. Not that uncle Dwight didn't try. When I was five, he sent me to the snobbiest private kindergarten in Hancock Park." He grinned. "Three days into the semester it became clear that my presence was" — he mimicked a histrionic schoolmarm — "upsetting to the other children."

"I can imagine."

"They were doing reading readiness exercises — colour matching, learning the alphabet, stuff like that. I thought it was mind-numbing and refused to cooperate. As punishment, they put me in the corner by myself, which was no punishment at all because my fantasies were terrific entertainment. Meanwhile, I'd got hold of an old paperback copy of The Grapes of Wrath that someone had left lying around at home. The cover was really interesting, so I picked it up and started to read it. Most of it was pretty accessible, so I really got into it, reading in bed at night with a flashlight, stashing it in my lunch box and taking it to school. I'd sneak in a few pages during snack time and when they stuck me in the corner. After a month or so, when I was halfway through the book, that bitch of a teacher found it. She freaked out, snatched it out of my hands, so I attacked her — punching, biting, a real fight. They called Uncle Dwight down, and the teacher told him I was hyperactive and a discipline problem and needed professional help. I jumped up, accused her of being a thief, and said she was oppressing me the same way the farm workers had been oppressed. I still remember how their jaws dropped — like robots that had become unhinged. She shoved the book in front of me and said, 'Read!' — just like a Nazi storm trooper ordering a prisoner to march. I buzzed through a couple of sentences, and she told me to stop. That was it — no more kindergarten for Master Cadmus."

He stuck out his tongue and licked ketchup from his lower lip.

"Anyway, so much for school days." He looked at his watch. "Oops. Gotta call my ride." And with that, he was off.

The Friday afternoon visits became regular after that, a floating crap game with ideas as the dice. We talked in the office, in the graduate reading room, over junk food in the Coop, and while strolling the shaded walkways that webbed the campus. He was fatherless and, despite the guardianship of an uncle, seemed to have little awareness of what it meant to be male. As I fielded countless questions about myself, all framed in the hungrily naive manner of an immigrant seeking morsels of information about a new homeland, I knew I was becoming his role model. But the questioning was one way; when I attempted to probe into his personal life, he changed the subject or emitted a blitzkrieg of irrelevant abstractions.

It was an ill-defined relationship, neither friendship nor therapy, for the latter implies a contract to help, and he had yet to confess the existence of a problem. True, he was intellectually alienated, but so were most of the kids on the project; alienation was assumed to be a common trait of those in the cosmic range of intelligence. He sought no help, wanted only to talk. And talk. About psychology, philosophy, politics, literature.

Nevertheless, I never relinquished the suspicion that he'd shown up that first Friday to unburden himself of something that bothered him deeply. I'd observed his moodiness and periodic anxiety, bouts of withdrawal and depression that lasted for days, had noticed the sudden dark look or wet eye in the midst of a seemingly neutral conversation, the acute constriction of the throat and involuntary tremble of hand.

He was a troubled boy, plagued, I was sure, by significant conflict. No doubt it was buried deep, wrapped, like a mummy, in a gauzy cocoon of defences, and getting to the core would be no mean task. I decided to bide my time: The science of psychotherapy is knowing what to say, the art is knowing when to say it. A premature move, and all would be lost.

On the sixteenth Friday he arrived carrying a load of sociology books and started to talk about his family, spurred on, supposedly, by a volume on family structure. As if lecturing from that text, he ejected the facts, helter-skelter in a voice devoid of emotion: The Cadmuses were "rolling in money'; his paternal grandfather had built an empire in construction and California real estate. The old man was long gone, but people spoke of him as if he were some kind of god. His other grandparents were dead, too.

As were both his parents. ("Almost like a hex, huh? Sure you wanna stick around with me?")

His mother had died in childbirth; he'd seen pictures but knew little about her. Three years later his father had committed suicide by hanging himself. The responsibility of raising an orphaned toddler had fallen to his father's younger brother, Dwight. This had translated to the hiring of a succession of nannies, none of whom had stuck around long enough to mean anything to Jamey. A few years later Dwight had married and fathered two daughters, and now all of them were one happy family — this last comment pronounced with bitterness and a look that warned against further questions.

His father's suicide was one subject I was determined to broach eventually. He'd indicated no self-destructive thoughts or impulses, but I considered him at elevated suicidal risk; the moodiness concerned me, as did his extreme perfectionism, sometimes unrealistic expectations, and fluctuating self-esteem. When you added a history of parental suicide, the odds tipped further upward; the possibility that he'd choose, one bleak day, to imitate the father he'd never known couldn't be ignored.

It came to a head midway through our twentieth session.

He liked to quote poetry — Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth — and was particularly enamoured of a poet named Thomas Chatterton, of whom I'd never heard. My questions about the man were evaded with contentions that a poet's work spoke for itself. So I did a little library research of my own.

An afternoon spent slogging through dusty volumes of literary criticism produced some interesting facts: The experts considered Chatterton a genius, the chief poet of England's eighteenth-century Gothic revival and the major precursor to the Romantic movement, but in his day he'd been alternately ignored or vilified.

A tormented, tragic figure, Chatterton lusted for fortune and fame and was denied both. Frustrated at the lack of appreciation for his own works, he perpetrated a major literary fraud in 1768, producing a group of poems supposedly written by a fifteenth-century monk named Thomas Rowley. But Rowley never existed; he was a figment of Chatterton's imagination, his name cribbed from a tombstone at St. John's Church in Bristol. Ironically, the Rowley poems were well received by the literati, and Chatterton enjoyed a brief, vicarious adulation — until the hoax came to light and its victims exacted their revenge.

Excommunicated from the literary scene, the poet was reduced to pamphleteering and menial jobs and, eventually, to begging for scraps of food. There was a final, morbid twist: Though penniless and denied bread on credit by local merchants, the starving Chatterton complained to a benevolent apothecary of rat infestation in his garret and was dispensed arsenic.

On August 24, 1770, Thomas Chatterton swallowed poison, a suicide at the age of seventeen.

The next time Jamey quoted from him I reported what I'd learned. We were sitting on the rim of the inverted fountain that fronted the psych building. It was a clear, warm day, and he'd taken off his shoes and socks to let the water trickle over bony white feet.

"Uh-huh," he said glumly. "So what?"

"Nothing. You got me curious, so I looked him up. He was an interesting fellow."

He moved several feet away and stared into the fountain, kicking one heel against the concrete with enough force to redden the skin.

"Something the matter, Jamey?"

"Nothing."

Several minutes of tense silence passed before I spoke again.

"You seem angry about something. Does it bother you that I looked up Chatterton?"

"No." He turned away disgustedly. "That's not what pisses me off. It's that you're so smug — thinking you understand me. Chatterton was a genius, Jamey's a genius; Chatterton was a misfit, Jamey's a misfit. Click, click, click. Putting it all together like some fucking case history!"

A pair of passing students heard the anger in his voice and turned to stare. He didn't notice them and gnawed on his lip.

"You're probably worried I'm gonna snarf rat poison up in some attic, right?"

"No. I've—"

"Bullshit. You shrinks are all the same." He folded his arms across his chest, kept smashing at the fountain. Pinpoints of blood sprouted on his heel.

I tried again.

"What I was saying is that I've wanted to talk to you about suicide, but it has nothing to do with Chatterton."

"Oh, really? And what does it have to do with?"

"I'm not saying you're suicidal. But I have concerns, and I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't bring them up, okay?"

"Okay, okay. Just spit it out."

"All right," I said, choosing my words carefully. "Everyone has bad days, but you're depressed way too much of the time. You're an exceptional person — and I don't mean just your intelligence. You're sensitive, caring, and honest." The compliments might have been slaps across the face from the way they made him flinch. "Yet you don't seem to like yourself very much."

"What's to like?"

"A lot."

"Right."

"That's part of what worries me — the way you put yourself down. You set extremely high standards for yourself, and when you succeed, you ignore the success and immediately raise your standards. But when you fail, you won't let go of it. You keep punishing yourself, telling yourself you're worthless."

"So what's the point?" he demanded.

"The point," I said, "is that you're setting yourself up for constant misery."

He avoided eye contact. The blood from his heel trickled into the water and disappeared in a pink swirl.

"None of this is meant as criticism," I added. "It's just that you're going to encounter disappointment throughout your life — everyone does — and it would be good to know how to cope with it."

"Sounds like a great plan," he said sarcastically. "When do we start?"

"Whenever you want."

"I want now, okay? Show me how to cope. In three easy lessons."

"First I need to know more about you."

"You know plenty."

"We've talked plenty, but I really don't know much at all. Not about the things that bother you or turn you on — your goals, your values."

"Life and death stuff, huh?"

"Let's say important stuff."

He faced me, smiling dreamily.

"You wanna know how I feel about life and death, Dr. D.? I'll tell you. Both suck. Death's probably quieter."

Crossing his legs, he examined the bloody heel as if studying a biology specimen.

"We don't have to talk about this now," I said.

"But I want to! You've been leading up to it all these months, right? This is what all the buddy-buddy stuff has been about, right? Building rapport so you can head-shrink more effectively. So let's talk about it now, okay! You want to know if I think about killing myself? Sure. Once or twice a week."

"Are they passing thoughts, or do they stay with you for a while?"

"Six of one, half dozen of the other."

"Do you ever think about a method?"

He laughed out loud, closed his eyes, and began reciting in alow voice:

The eyes opened.

"Tom C. had an answer for everything, didn't he?"

When I didn't respond, he laughed again, forcing it.

"Not amused, Dr. D.? What do you want, catharsis and confession? It's my life, and if I decide to bow out, it's my decision."

"Your decision will affect other people."

"Bullshit."

"No one lives in a vacuum, Jamey. People care about you. I care about you."

"What textbook did you pull that out of?"

The fortress seemed impenetrable. I searched for a wedge.

"Suicide is a hostile act, Jamey. You, of all people, should appreciate that."

His reaction was sudden and extreme. The blue eyes ignited, and his voice choked with rage. Jumping up, he turned on me, shouting shrilly:

"My father was dog shit! And so are you for bringing him up!"

He bobbled a shaky finger in front of my face, sputtered, and ran barefoot across the courtyard. I picked up his shoes and socks and took off after him.

Having crossed the science squad, he swung left and disappeared down a flight of steps. Catching up wasn't difficult because his gait was clumsy, spindly legs knocking against one another like syncopated chopsticks.

The steps ended at the loading dock of the chemistry building, an empty concrete rectangle, oil-slicked and darkened by brick walls on three sides. There was only one exit, a green metal door. He tried the latch, but it was locked. Turning to run, he saw me and froze, panting. His face was white and tear-streaked. I put down the shoes and approached.

"Go away!"

"Jamey—"

"Leave me alone!"

"Let's work this out—"

"Why?" he screamed. "Why bother?"

"Because I care about you. You're important to me, and I want you to stick around."

He broke into sobs and looked as if he were going to crumple. I came nearer, put my arm around his shoulder, and held him.

"You're important to me, too, Dr. D." He sniffled into my jacket. I felt his arms go around my waist, small hands caressing my back. "You really are. 'Cause I love you."

I stiffened. It was the wrong thing to do, the worst thing to do. But it was reflexive.

He cried out and twisted free, the young face a mask of hatred and pain.

"There! Now you know! I'm a little faggot! I've been one for years, and now I have the hots for you!"

The shock had worn off, and I was in control again, ready to be therapeutic. I stepped forward. He shrank back.

"Get away, you lame fuck! Leave me the fuck alone! If you don't, I'll scream for help!"

"Jamey, let's talk—"

"Help!" he wailed. The sound reverberated in the emptiness of the dock.

"Please—"

He screamed again.

I put the shoes and socks down and walked away.

Over the next few weeks I made repeated attempts to talk to him, but he shunned me. I played the scene over and over in my head, wondering what I could have done differently, wishing for magic while cursing the limitations of words and pauses.

The more I thought about it, the more I worried about suicide. After much deliberation I broke confidentiality and phoned his uncle. Knowing it was the right thing to do didn't make it any easier.

I talked my way through an army of underlings and finally reached Dwight Cadmus at his office in Beverly Hills. Introducing myself, I kept the betrayal to a minimum, mentioning nothing about homosexuality, addressing only my concerns for the boy's safety.

He listened without interruption, answered in a voice that was dry and deliberate.

"Hmm, I see. Yes, that is of concern." A ruminative pause. "Is there anything else, Doctor?"

"Yes, if you have guns in the house, unload them, hide the ammunition, and put them away."

"I'll have that done immediately."

"Lock up your medicines. Try to keep him away from knives—"

"Certainly."

"— and ropes."

Strained silence.

"If that's all, Doctor—"

"I want to reemphasise how important it is to get him some professional help. If you need a referral, I'd be happy to provide you with a couple of names."

"Thank you. I'll discuss this with my wife and get back to you."

I gave him my number, and he thanked me again for my concern.

I never heard from him.