John Dobbyn - Neon Dragon

“I didn’t realize he was into that, Barry. How long?”

He ruffled the beard. I looked to see what would fly out, but nothing did.

“I don’t know. I heard it eighth-hand. I don’t know Bradley personally. I think he got heavily involved in the spring term last year. This year I think I heard he was running it.”

“Do they have an office?”

“Are you kidding? They’re showcase. The president moved them into the Yard so they could be close to the freshman. I think they’re in Dunlevy.”

I thanked Barry with a wave instead of a shake and promised to keep in touch.

Dunlevy is a neomodern, neo-utilitarian, neogrotesque building in the northeast corner of Harvard Yard. Architecturally, Harvard is much like its faculty. By the time an individual has reached the level of scholarship necessary to be invited to join the faculty, there is usually an independence and self-assurance that has evolved in the mix that makes the individual defiantly unique. To say that a Harvard professor doesn’t fit into a pattern falls somewhere between an irrelevancy and a compliment. The same is true of the architecture.

Unlike Barry’s sign at the front door, the permanently lettered sign at Dunlevy proclaimed that The Point was in suite 203. In this case, “suite” meant two adjoining rooms with identical neo-Ikea desks and chairs in each.

The door was open. There were two students, both white, hovering over a sheaf of papers at a desk. I gathered that one was the tutor, the other was the tutee, and the subject was my old nemesis, calculus. I mercifully decided not to break the train of logic and passed through to the second room. Feeling less intrusive there, I got the attention of what looked like two junior-aged students, both African American, one male, one female, both attractive in spite of the oversized collegey garb they were draped in.

The woman smiled and offered a hand.

“Hi. I’m Gail Warden.”

“Michael Knight.” I shook the hand, and also that of the man who offered his, together with the words, “Rasheed Maslin. What can we do for you? You from the college?”

“No. I’m a lawyer. I’m Anthony Bradley’s lawyer. Can I talk to you?”

They exchanged the kind of positive lip and eye signals that meant, “Well, all right.”

They swung a chair around for me and settled down to offer anything they could to help.

“Tell me something about Anthony.”

Gail was the first to speak. “He’s a man, Mr. Knight.”

My look said I didn’t grasp her meaning.

“That’s not slang, Mr. Knight. I mean he’s mature, more than you’d think from his age. He came through a lot of growing up in the last year.”

“How so?”

Gail nodded to Rasheed and gestured at the door next to him leading to the other room. Rasheed closed it.

“You know about his father? I mean being a judge and a football hero and gonna be on the Supreme Judicial Court? All that was a heavy burden for Anthony.”

“Burden?”

“That’s right. Anthony felt he had to be just as good at the same things. He couldn’t do it. Anthony’s got a lot of talents, but they’re different. Like last year, he had to play football. But he couldn’t just play football. He had to be as good as his father, or maybe his father’s legend.”

“Did his father put pressure on him?”

“I don’t know, but he didn’t have to. Anthony put pressure on himself that nobody could live up to. When he knew he wasn’t making it at football, he went into a depression. He couldn’t study, then his grades started going to pieces. Then he got more depressed.”

Rasheed got into the conversation with a quiet voice. “Did he tell you about the attempted suicide?”

Gail caught his eye and his voice clutched. It was apparently not a well-known fact. We needed some ground rules.

“Listen, folks. Anthony’s on trial for murder. Nobody’s going to fight for his side but me and the lawyer I work for. I need to know everything I can about him. I’ll sift out what I need. And all of it’s confidential.”

Rasheed stole a quick look at Gail like a batter getting the sign from the third-base coach. She apparently gave him the green light.

“Last year, about finals time in the spring, we were supposed to have a meeting about setting up finals tutorials for some of the people we were helping. Anthony didn’t show up.”

I jumped in for a quick one. “Was Anthony a helper or being helped?”

Gail took it. “He was a helper from day one. He had a good prep-school education, which is different from a lot of the kids they admit. He got involved with us right away, in spite of the time football was taking.”

I nodded. “Go back to the meeting, Rasheed.”

“When he didn’t show up, we called him, but no answer. A little while later we decided to go check out his room.”

He stopped for a moment. I wasn’t sure why, but it gave me a chance to ask, “Why were you worried about him? I mean, anything could have kept him from one meeting.”

“Not Anthony.” They said it together, and Gail went on. “He took these helping sessions very seriously.”

Rasheed went on. “Besides, he’d been getting more and more into depression. We kind of…” He glanced at Gail. “… kept an eye on him. We tried to talk to him, like build up his confidence. But we weren’t getting anywhere. We wanted him to get some help.”

“So did you find him?”

Rasheed looked down at the bracelet he was fidgeting with.

“Yeah. He was in his room.”

The pause indicated the need for urging. “Was it the suicide attempt?”

Rasheed just nodded. Gail’s eyes watered over, and I thought about dropping it, but I needed to learn all I could.

“How?” Neither one was looking at me, but Rasheed made a gesture across his wrist.

“What did you do?”

“We put pressure on it. Got him to the hospital. He did OK. We got him in time.”

I thought I heard Gail say almost under her breath, “No, we didn’t.”

I looked at her. She was so sincere she had my heart as well as my attention. When our eyes met, maybe it showed.

“How was he afterwards?”

“He was OK.” Rasheed’s version.

“No, he wasn’t.” Gail didn’t need the third-base coach. “He never really recovered from it.”

I said, “He seemed to be healthy when I saw him recently.”

“You mean physically. Yes, the stitches healed, and he got his energy back. But there was something missing.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. You know how sometimes there’s something about a person that almost defines them. You can’t put your finger on it, but when it’s not there, it’s like emptiness.”

I wondered if Gail could have had more than a passing affection for whatever that something was. Rasheed looked at her gently with what could have been either agreement or empathy, or maybe more.

There was a jolt that brought us all out of it when the door to the other room swung open. A string of high-pitched jive rolled like a babbling stream off the lips of a six-foot, rail-thin dude who came through the door in full swing. He had a walk that had arms, feet, hips, and head syncopating with each other to a beat somewhere in his own universe.

The gist of the jive, as nearly as I could put it together, was the registration of a complaint that the local rap station had been put to rest. It flowed until he spotted the unexpected visitor. Then I saw “the freeze.”

It took me back through the past, and it’s like bike riding. You never forget. I learned it when I spent some time with kids in a Puerto Rican settlement house. I was seriously Puerto Rican at that time and looking for cultural identity, not the well-adjusted biracial of current times. That was when I learned about “the freeze.”