Jonathan Kellerman - Alex 03 - Over the Edge

by Over the Edge

  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 premat
ure 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:

  Since we can die but once, what matters it,

  If rope or garter, poison, pistol, sword,

  Slow wasting sickness or the sudden burst of valve

  arterial in the noblest parts,

  Curtail the misery of human life?

  Tho' varied is the cause, the effect's the same

  All to one common dissolution tends.

  The eyes opened.

  'Tom C. had an an
swer 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.