dressed in what the nurses called "day
clothes" -- the civilian duds that I'd packed before leaving the hotel, which an
orderly retrieved for me from a locked closet in my room. The clustered nuts
were watching slackjaw TV, or staring out the windows, or rocking in place,
fidgeting and muttering. I found myself a seat next to a birdy woman whose long
oily hair was parted down the middle, leaving a furrow in her scalp lined with
twin rows of dandruff. She was young, maybe twenty-five, and seemed the least
stuporous of the lot.

"Hello," I said to her.

She smiled shyly, then pitched forward and vomited copiously and noisily between
her knees. I shrank back and struggled to keep my face neutral. A nurse hastened
to her side and dropped a plastic bucket in the stream of puke, which was still
gushing out of her mouth, her thin chest heaving.

"Here, Sarah, in here," the nurse said, with an air of irritation.

"Can I help?" I said, ridiculously.

She looked sharply at me. "Art, isn't it? Why aren't you in Group? It's after
one!"

"Group?" I asked.

"Group. In that corner, there." She gestured at a collection of sagging sofas
underneath one of the ward's grilled-in windows. "You're late, and they've
started without you."

There were four other people there, two women and a young boy, and a doctor in
mufti, identifiable by his shoes -- not slippers -- and his staff of office, the
almighty badge-on-a-lanyard.

Throbbing with dread, I moved away from the still-heaving girl to the sofa
cluster and stood at its edge. The group turned to look at me. The doctor
cleared his throat. "Group, this is Art. Glad you made it, Art. You're a little
late, but we're just getting started here, so that's OK. This is Lucy, Fatima,
and Manuel. Why don't you have a seat?" His voice was professionally smooth and
stultifying.

I sank into a bright orange sofa that exhaled a cloud of dust motes that danced
in the sun streaming through the windows. It also exhaled a breath of trapped
ancient farts, barf-smell, and antiseptic, the *parfum de asylum* that gradually
numbed my nose to all other scents on the ward. I folded my hands in my lap and
tried to look attentive.

"All right, Art. Everyone in the group is pretty new here, so you don't have to
worry about not knowing what's what. There are no right or wrong things. The
only rules are that you can't interrupt anyone, and if you want to criticize,
you have to criticize the idea, and not th