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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