Over the Edge (4 page)

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.