Voluntary Madness Part 14

I began to unwind the loops my ideas came in and got stuck in, and I began to internalize them in new ways. I took them with me like talismans or touchstones in my pockets.

Courage. There's another word. Another idea too big for its casing. It, too, means something new to me now. It means blind. And deaf. And dumb as a G.o.d who doesn't answer. It means put on your helmet and jump, or cross yourself and charge. Stop thinking so much and just do, because there is nothing else for it but a crazy, all-out, arms-flailing gumption and gusto that defies all logic and sense.

Normal life is nuts. It's a downhill deterioration to death no matter how you spice it along the way, and there's nothing you can do about it. Now, a sane person, when faced with that, would just plunk his a.s.s down at the starting line, or wherever along the way this realization finally came to him, and say, "Are you kidding? I quit. I'll slide the rest the way or sit here and smoke."

It takes a true lunatic, or someone functioning with the critical apparatus of a worker bee, to keep scrabbling up that hill when he knows his destiny is dust.

But that is what is required. Go on.

It's not that my view of the world changed at St. Luke's. I just learned to stop obsessing about it so bleakly. Or, I should say, I learned this again. It wasn't new knowledge. Not entirely anyway. I had learned it, or implemented it in the past, through the wondrous circuit-breaking, cloud-busting effects of medication. That, in my view, is the great virtue of medication. It blocks thought, or filters it to a manageable glow.

But you can get some of the same results with your mind, too, if you work at it.

At St. Luke's I got it through the silence and calm and privacy of retreat in a room with a night-light, and I got it with the help of the kind of group therapy that you get in card games in a dayroom with drug addicts and other high-functioning kooks like me. I got it through announcing my troubles aloud to a good listener and by meeting a doctor I could believe in. I had my faith in the system restored a little at St. Luke's, and this can do wonders for your outlook on the world. Realizing that some people are good at what they do, that they care, that they want to make a difference, and do-all of this gives you back a little spark of belief.

And then we are back to words.

Yet another puffed-up word. Belief. That was really the big one for me. And, boy, was it redefined. Because when I say "belief" I really mean "make-belief," and by make-belief I mean pretend.

I learned to pretend. To pretend that I didn't know all the heavy things that I thought I knew. I learned to purposely forget.

Because-and here is Sister Pete having her say again-as Eve and then Adam found out, there is a whole h.e.l.l of a lot of knowledge about the G.o.dd.a.m.ned human condition that we are not ready for.

So when you happen on it-it being some kind of insight, which may or may not take the form of a really delicious apple-and being some kind of insight, which may or may not take the form of a really delicious apple-and it it convinces you of a bunch of true, inescapable stuff that you really can't live with, the best advice I can give you is this: just hand the apple back. Just unknow. Because you can. That's one of the beauties of having fallen from grace. You can lie, especially to yourself. What's more you can lie to yourself about lying to yourself, and best of all, really believe it. That's denial. The real sinning graduate's prize. Lying in layers, glazing your eyes until the view is like a Monet. One pastel blur. convinces you of a bunch of true, inescapable stuff that you really can't live with, the best advice I can give you is this: just hand the apple back. Just unknow. Because you can. That's one of the beauties of having fallen from grace. You can lie, especially to yourself. What's more you can lie to yourself about lying to yourself, and best of all, really believe it. That's denial. The real sinning graduate's prize. Lying in layers, glazing your eyes until the view is like a Monet. One pastel blur.

In my experience, going into the hospital for depression at a place like St. Luke's was a little bit like having a sit-and-spin, or performing that whirligigging motion you did barefoot in the gra.s.s in your backyard as a kid. The spiraling dizzied you, and then when you stopped and got your balance, for a second, you looked at your surroundings with new eyes, as if you had never seen them before.

That's the idea. To bring yourself back to ignorance, back to the empty center, because it's the only way through, or at least it was in my case at that time.

Asylum did that for me. Reset me to blank and sent me back into my life with the energy to pretend. It's the first game you master as a child- pretend-and, for my money, it's one of the most helpful skills you can cultivate as an adult.

Magic Doc was right. The best doctor may very well be a dyslexic one, someone who sees the world a little backward and is kind enough to turn your head around, or, true to the slang of the profession, shrink it. Shrink your view, anyway. Resize the picture. Make the cosmic rinky-d.i.n.k.

Bottom line? Definitely lose the forest for a tree, a branch, bark, a leaf, whatever your pathetic little mechanism can handle, because it certainly can't handle the whole show.

Is this a skill? Yes, but not one you learn in medical school. It's not learning at all. It's unlearning, which is why someone who thinks he knows everything can never teach it to you. I guess it sounds like I'm talking in circles. And I am, sort of. Because reason, of all things, is the enemy. An excess of sense is senseless. That way madness lies. Take refuge instead in the cupcake, the sugary sop morsel that gets you through. The digestible piece and no more.

And whatever you do, stop asking so many questions. It's true as advertised. Knock and the door will be opened to you.

So don't f.u.c.king knock.

Or do, because you're writing a G.o.dd.a.m.ned book, and so you have to.

I had one more place to go.

I found this third facility, Mobius Group, on the Web. I was looking for a place that was offering a different approach from the locked-ward, often drug-riddled treatments I'd found in conventional hospitals like Meriwether and St. Luke's.

There weren't many. The first few I tracked down were outpatient facilities that were either defunct-not enough clients-or nearly defunct, struggling by with one or two stranglers and a mountain of crumbling goodwill.

These places presented themselves as being philosophically opposed to the use of psychiatric medications (deeming them addictive, dangerous, and purely cosmetic). They relied instead on intensive therapy, play, companionship, the human touch. I was sympathetic to the approach and eager to try it myself, but I didn't fancy being the only patient in the facility bouncing from shrink to paid playmate to art therapist like some overgrown special-needs child. I wanted to be among other people trying the same thing.

This kind of therapy is a lot of work. It's expensive and it takes time and effort. Most insurance won't cover it, so the clients need to be wealthy. They have to have weeks, if not months, to devote to therapy, and they have to be willing to fight their demons day in, day out, head-on. Most people would rather take-or are only offered-a pill. It's cheaper, faster, and easier.

But Mobius seemed to be up and running, prospering even. I suspected there were two reasons for this. First, while they catered (as advertised) to the mentally distressed, their primary client base was addicts in recovery. As I learned when I got there, a fair number of the people there were court-mandated to be in rehab, and as private, nonhospital rehab joints go, Mobius was quite a bargain. The program was often partially covered by insurance, depending on your plan, and even if it wasn't, it was only just over $6,000 for a two-week stay, less than half what it cost to stay at Meriwether or St. Luke's for ten days. And as for quality of service and environment, Mobius was a far cry from Meriwether and St. Luke's. It wasn't as cushy by a long stretch as some of the fancier private rehab facilities that celebrities and the obscenely rich frequent-these can easily cost $50,000 a month and up-but it was by no means uncomfortable. It was within reach of the middle cla.s.s, and even possibly the working cla.s.s, and gave you far more freedom than locked wards.

Second, and probably more important, Mobius allowed you to bring your own prescribed medications, which you then surrendered to the program nurse for proper dosing. They also had a psychiatrist on staff who could prescribe medications as needed. This meant that you could get the benefit of their intensive therapy without having to commit yourself to a potentially brutal withdrawal from your meds, or worse, and far longer lasting, a discontinuation rebound effect that could mean-and in my experience had had meant-a worsening of your original symptoms, be they depressive, manic, or psychotic. Getting intensive therapy and discontinuing your meds are two separate things, both difficult. Doing them at the same time can be brutal and, as one doc at the near-defunct antimedication facility told me, really means setting aside three to six months of your life. meant-a worsening of your original symptoms, be they depressive, manic, or psychotic. Getting intensive therapy and discontinuing your meds are two separate things, both difficult. Doing them at the same time can be brutal and, as one doc at the near-defunct antimedication facility told me, really means setting aside three to six months of your life.

While locked away in Meriwether and St. Luke's, I often fantasized about the perfect therapeutic facility. I called it Therapy House and imagined building it from the ground up on spec with unlimited funds. I saw it as a kind of chalet, with a cathedral ceiling in the common room, big windows and lots of light, a working fireplace, sectional couches and reading chairs, and minimalist but cozy mountain retreat decor. Adjacent to the main room, I imagined a library with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and a well-stocked a.s.sortment of periodicals, DVDs, CDs, and computers. Each client-say, the house could accommodate twelve-would have his or her own bedroom and en suite bathroom. There would be a large kitchen staffed by a full-time chef who would provide balanced, healthy, organic meals and snacks, which all the patients would eat together at one large table in the dining room. There would be an Olympic-size swimming pool, a fully equipped gym, a yoga and meditation studio and instructor, a spa with ma.s.sage and body treatments, a large property with gardens and walking paths, bicycles, hammocks, climbing trees, and even tree houses. There would be a full-time staff of nurses, psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers, and the patients would receive an hour of individual therapy every day, as well as several hours of various group therapies.

Sometimes I pa.s.sed idle hours in Meriwether and St. Luke's dreaming this stuff up, furnishing the fantasy, even imagining which foundations I would apply to for the money. Best of all, I imagined making it accessible to people of all income levels so that anyone from Mother T to pill-popping upper-middle-cla.s.s housewives could qualify for treatment.

Having imagined all this, I was astounded to find that the people at Mobius were offering something quite similar, albeit on a less extravagant scale and not all housed in one self-contained facility, though they were working on just such a plan.

Still, here was a place founded by a clinical psychologist, Dr. Franklin, and his wife, a place that had been up and running for six years, that was committed to the practice of healing the whole person-mind, body, spirit-and doing so without the use of restraints or locked wards.

Their Web site was very detailed, and by perusing it, I learned everything I needed to know about Mobius's facilities and program. Patients were housed in four three-bedroom apartments. Twelve was maximum capacity, a manageable group both logistically and therapeutically. Each client had a private bedroom, and shared two full baths, a living room with cable TV and wireless Internet access, and a fully equipped kitchen with small dining area. The apartments were all in a large apartment complex complete with a pool, a Jacuzzi, and a gym.

From 9 a.m. until 3:30 p.m. clients attended various group and individual therapy sessions at the Mobius offices. In the evenings, after cla.s.s, clients did various things. Once a week they attended a yoga cla.s.s; once a week they went to the bookstore for a few hours; once a week they did their grocery shopping (clients cooked all their own meals in the apartments); once a week they went to the movies; and three times a week they went to a spa, where they could book ma.s.sages, pedicures, manicures, and facials (these were not included in the price of the stay, of course). They could work out in the gym, swim in the pool, or lounge in the hammocks out back on the sh.o.r.es of the bay. Not bad for three grand a week, and jubilantly close to my fantasy bin trip.

After St. Luke's, the idea of flying into a place I'd never been before and committing myself to a recovery facility sight unseen didn't seem quite so, well, crazy anymore. Besides, this was the last leg of the tour, I told myself. Get it over with.

So I did. I filled out the online application form and read all the material on the various criteria for admission. As far as I could tell, my admission to the program would not be denied or delayed for any of the reasons listed on the Web site. I wasn't suffering from acute drug withdrawal or undergoing drug detoxification. I didn't have a severe psychiatric disorder that required hospitalization. I did not have a severe s.e.xual disorder (or at least I didn't think so, but it was unclear what this meant). I did not have any infectious, communicable, or contagious diseases, and I did not engage in disruptive or aggressive behaviors that would be incompatible with a small group living environment.

I would, however, have to consent to a criminal background check, as all clients did. Otherwise, the admission form was remarkably short and to the point. It asked me to list my mental disorders-clients could, apparently, be trusted to do this accurately-what medications I was taking, whether I used drugs or alcohol, and what search engine and key words I had used to find Mobius on the Web. Essentially, it was like any other commercial transaction: name, date of birth, address, and method of payment.

I booked a two-week stay for myself, booked a flight, and got on a plane.

SANCTUM.

Mobius

Diggs, a well-dressed, whippet-thin boy of Indian descent, was sitting in the baggage claim area holding a paper sign with my name on it. The sign was perched on his crossed legs facing him, as if he'd half given up trying to find me. I had stopped in the main terminal for a Starbucks, a.s.suming from past experience that it was going to be my last good cup of coffee for two weeks.

The line had been long, so by the time I got to the baggage claim area, it was largely deserted and my bag had been put in a pile to the side of the carousel. I pa.s.sed Diggs once on my way to the pile and again on my way back. I saw the sign in his lap on the return.

"That's me," I said.

"I saw you before," he said, as he took the handle of my wheelie, "but I thought, No way is she forty."

A charmer. That's all he'd known about me. My name and approximate age. And presumably my diagnosis.

I wondered if they'd trained him to be this genial. Compliment the depressives right off. Women on their age. Men on their gadgets.

We walked the short distance from the terminal to the parking lot and Diggs heaved my bag into the Ford Expedition.

He was wearing pleated slacks, black loafers, and a pressed b.u.t.ton-down shirt. Far better turned out than your average twenty-two-year-old psych major who is just out of college and makes his living shuttling f.u.c.k-ups to and from the airport.

He did more than that, actually, as I would soon learn. In the mornings, he shuttled clients to the Mobius group offices, where we underwent our therapy and took our daily instruction on how to stop being a danger to society and ourselves. While we were in therapy all day, Diggs did paperwork in the office, or took patients to the clinic for their blood work (state law mandated a test for syphilis), or made more runs to the airport for new arrivals. Then in the afternoon he shuttled us back to the nearby apartment complex.

He was dependable. Mature. A comely face to meet you in baggage claim when you'd bottomed out on substances, or sunk eyeball deep in the mood bog, or otherwise come undone enough to commit yourself to a place you'd only read about on the Web, and which you couldn't be at all sure wasn't a cult.

When you saw Diggs, though, your fears were allayed somewhat. You thought, "If this is the Moonies, they're good good, because this guy seems totally normal."

And he was. Suavely normal. He knew not to ask anything intrusive, but he made pleasant reciprocal conversation that didn't sound like what a gofer says to a cripple, which is, by harsher accounts, what we were. However you sliced it, his job was to make a fairly shameful situation seem respectable, and he did it expertly. He smoothed. He handled damaged goods gingerly without appearing to do so, easing the last leg of a breakdown so that he could bring us in calm. He was the discreetest of valets.

As we rode along in the Expedition, I asked him about where he'd gone to school and where he was from, if he had any siblings, and so on. He tossed back softb.a.l.l.s-"And where are you from originally?" He drove a.s.sertively but well within the speed limit, the way you do with your mother-in-law or other pa.s.sengers who scare easily.

I never felt the burden of making conversation. It flowed through the predictable channels without effort, and the drive went by without incident. We drove directly to the Mobius offices for check-in.

Despite my good opinion of Diggs, I was still harboring a few th.o.r.n.y worries about the potential Moonie situation. I had read on the Web site, for example, about the program nurse, Jan, whom Diggs had said we were going to meet right away. I was expecting the worst, and for no other reason than that the term "program nurse" had given me the creeps. I'd been unable to stop myself from imagining some type A crypto-n.a.z.i in starched white and squeaky shoes with a chinchilla hiding under her peaked paper hat.

But when Diggs led me into Jan's tidy windowed office, the first in a row of similar offices that all opened off a slim main hallway, I knew that I'd let my apprehensions run entirely away with me. Jan was barely five feet tall in her shoes and comfortably built, padded but not plump. Her dyed blond hair was styled in a grown-out pageboy and her blue eyes hid no subtext. She was wearing sandals, three-quarter-length trousers, and a short-sleeved b.u.t.ton-down blouse, which is what she wore virtually every day, the default warm-weather business casual for a low-maintenance woman in her midforties. She was kind and efficient, remarkably cheerful about what was a fairly laborious routine that she was often required to perform several times a week with each new b.u.mbling client.

Most of it was paper signing. I must have signed forty sheets-disclaimers and permissions for everything from the syphilis test, to a short-term lease agreement for the apartment complex, to a declaration of "patient's legal and human rights." But there was also the urine sampling, medication surrender, and bag inspection, as well as a.s.sorted sundry other smooth violations that const.i.tute patient intake procedure in the bin. Jan, as anyone in such circ.u.mstances is required to do, took your dignity in one hand and your autonomy in the other, but unlike so many others, she did it like a den mother in the Cub Scouts, softening the blow of your demerit with a smile, even as she pinned the shaming badge on your sleeve. I half-expected to get a lollypop at the end.

I'd arrived in the late morning, so by the time I'd finished with Jan, it was time for lunch. Diggs went to the local Boston Market and got me a meal. I ate it at the table in Mobius's small kitchen, which was located just next door to Jan's office.

As I sat eating, Mobius staff and clients were breaking for lunch as well, so various people wandered in or lingered. That's when I met Sam, one of Mobius's three therapists and the instructor-in-chief.

Superficially, Sam looked like Little Richard. He had the same pencil-thin mustache and wild kinky hair, and even a hint of the impish sparkle in the eye. But the likeness ended there. Sam was not a flashy entertainer. He was wearing what looked to be the traditional black-belted gi, and he sat very poised in his chair, like a person who was used to treating his body as an extension of his soul. He was calm and centered, as his profession would suggest, open but not loose, deliberate but unmannered. He was just there without agenda, like something in nature, alive and present but seeming to occupy no s.p.a.ce.

We sat at the kitchen table, he eating his habitual salad brought from home, and I eating my half chicken with sides. I asked him the usual background questions: Where are you from? How old are you? Are you married? Answers: New Jersey, fifty-three, and yes, two kids. None of this mattered much, though, when it came to knowing Sam. They were the wrong questions. There weren't any questions, really-just a sense that you got in his presence, the immediate sense of who a person is, because he knows himself.

Sam could teach me a lot, and would, not as my individual therapist-that job would go to another of the therapists on staff-but as a group therapist, and more so as our morning den chi bon instructor.

This was Sam's big gig. Every morning at Mobius the day's activities began with an hour and fifteen minutes of den chi bon, which I can best describe as a cross between tai chi, tai bo, and a seance.

At nine thirty we'd all gather in the activity room, which was at the far end of the long main hallway, at the opposite end from the kitchen. This was the room where all the group therapy and meetings took place throughout the day. It was the size of a small living room, piled with pillows and blankets, and people's art catha.r.s.es were posted all over the walls.

Sam would start the cla.s.s with yogic style stretches and deep breathing. We'd stand facing him with our feet positioned two to three feet apart. We'd spread our arms wide and swan-dive to touch our toes, and then we'd thrust our arms repeatedly from the prayer position at our heart centers, up and out to full extension above our heads, around to the sides, and back to center again. Soon these outward motions of the arms would grow more forceful and direct, like open-palmed punches, and the breathing would intensify accordingly, so that you looked as if you were parting a lead curtain over and over again, except that you were doing it gladly, as if mindless labor just made you happy and you gained energy and strength from the exertion. We'd do this for a long time, pulling and punching the air and stamping our feet, gesticulating more and more emphatically in ways that alternated between being voodooish and exaggeratedly masturbatory, and all the while breathing like we were about to give birth.

It was the kind of too earnest, misty-eyed exercise that I had trouble taking seriously, at least at first. Early on, I hovered at the back of the room, going through the motions, embarra.s.sed, imagining all the people in my life watching me join the feel-good follow-along Dancercise of Mobius Inc. The therapeutic value of learning to make an a.s.s of yourself.

But then, after a while, I thought: "Jesus, you self-important snot, just let go and have some fun. n.o.body's watching."

And so I did. And then, before long, I started getting into it. Maybe a little too into it, actually.

The beauty of all that heavy breathing was that it got you high, an interesting concept for an addiction recovery program. Learn how to get high on your own. Oxygen is potent stuff, and concentrated gasping will make you feel pretty buzzed after a while if you do it right.

At the end of the air punching and limb flailing-the "air" and "fire" portions of the ritual-when we'd gotten around to holding hands in a circle and swinging our arms like skipping kids-the "water" portion of the ritual-I was usually smiling like an addict, my eyes closed, my head turned up and all loose and wobbly on my neck. At the close of the ritual, the "earth" portion, when we stood there swaying and humming along with the music, or declaring our sober guiding thoughts for the day, we were supposed to be coming back to ground, but I was usually floating somewhere around the ceiling.

By the second or third day, I was hooked on den chi bon. We all were. Sam always had great music to go with it, the cheesier the better. The Phantom of the Opera The Phantom of the Opera was much loved, as was the starting music, which was always the same: a tolling bell and an Indian man with a profound liquid caramel voice talking about the dharmal door being open, transcending the path of sorrow and death, and refreshing springs of compa.s.sionate water causing all suffering to cease. Fabulous stuff. was much loved, as was the starting music, which was always the same: a tolling bell and an Indian man with a profound liquid caramel voice talking about the dharmal door being open, transcending the path of sorrow and death, and refreshing springs of compa.s.sionate water causing all suffering to cease. Fabulous stuff.

Sam was always so full of joy during the dance that sometimes he'd break into spontaneous laughter, and then several of the rest of us would, too, simply laughing at his laughter, and then laughing at our own laughter, and pretty soon we were crying with it, and the rest of the less game partic.i.p.ants would look at us sideways wondering what demon had possessed us, and wondering whether they should break and run while they still could.

Laughter, like heavy breathing, is another one of those natural highs that can drastically improve your mood, even if you're laughing at nothing at all, because, as happened to us, pretty soon you're laughing at the fact that you're laughing at nothing, and how absurd that is, and yet how good it feels, and then you're on the giggle train and rolling, and spasming in earnest, and having all kinds of bodily functions. Tears are rolling down your face, phlegm is coming up from your lungs, your bladder is ready to betray you, or maybe does a little, and you might even be drooling. It's quite a heave, especially at the end of a vigorous dance when you're already drenched in sweat. It's like the happy version of vomiting, or the less profane version of coming, depending on your point of view. Your whole body gets into it and squirts, and it's so pure and spiritual, it's fun for the whole family.

This was the kind of release that Sam could bring about in you with the simplest, most elemental tools: earth, air, fire, water. Yes, you're smirking, those New Age medievalisms given a new spook. I know. Believe me, I know.

But there is a perfect sense to it that becomes pretty blisteringly obvious if you give it a chance. What are we made of, after all? Literally. Flesh, breath, heat, fluid. These are the most basic parts of us, and yet we have forgotten how to use them. Our mind drives us through the world, pushing us on, feverishly achieving, obsessing, looking for occupation and results. But it's the body that gets us there. The body that mechanizes the mind, and the elements that mechanize the body. How strange, then, that we could be so removed from our own breathing, our own movements, from what we eat and drink, and excrete, so alienated from our own basic functions that someone has to reteach us how to perform them.

We knew as children. But now not even breathing comes as easily as breathing, crying rarely comes at all, and laughter has literally galvanized to irony, a metal-hard mirth that tightens, never releases, whose only liquid is bile, pa.s.sing through kidneys as stones. Who has ever p.i.s.sed himself over irony? p.i.s.sed on, to be sure, with deliberation and scorn. Ever a critic. But the involuntary burst? No. We have medications for that, to correct it when it happens, keep the p.i.s.s and the s.h.i.t and the sweat and the tears under wraps, or expel them on our schedule, and all so we can forget that we have bodies. Is it any wonder, then, why we end up in rehab and therapy, dancing around with Little Richard and a crooning swami trying to put the pieces back together?

That's what they were trying to do at Mobius, to help you to put the pieces back together, however asunder they'd been torn by experience, neglect, bitterness, life. Mobius was all about process and change, learning to see and then go about your life differently.

They called it process therapy, and as it happened, I'd arrived just in time to get my first exposure to it. By the time I'd finished eating my lunch with Sam, it was two o'clock. Carol, a Gertrude Steinish-looking woman with a close-cropped graying cap of hair, was the second of the three staff therapists, and the one with whom I'd be conducting my private sessions several times a week. She specialized in process therapy, and she was gearing up to lead that day's group session on the topic. She asked me to join, and since there didn't seem to be anything else to do until I could get a ride to the apartment complex later that afternoon, I said yes.

Carol, like Sam, was a licensed mental health counselor, or LMHC, which is akin to being a licensed clinical social worker, meaning that she had completed a master's degree as well as at least two years of graduate-level clinical work and had pa.s.sed a certification exam. In action, this meant that she knew the literature, but she wasn't bogged down by it, and tended to favor an experiential rather than an academic approach.

She was a connector. She connected with people emotionally. Her technique was interpersonal above all, but methodic, too. She warmed to you and led you out by the hand, if you would be led. But she also liked to draw charts and diagrams, or numbered lists and tables that could help you to organize your thoughts. She looked for patterns and sticking points, the layers of negativity and doubt that laced her clients' thinking and led them to despair or self-destruction.

As I filed into the activity room that afternoon with the five other resident clients (none of whom I'd met yet), Carol was already standing up at the white dry-erase board holding a smelly uncapped cobalt blue marker. She was writing the phrase: "I do not see things as they are. I see them as I am."

Then she turned and waited for us to settle, either sitting in the low L-SHAPED sling-back chairs that we unfolded and positioned in a semicircle around her or lying on our backs, heads propped up against a mound of pillows.

"True story," she said. "I was sitting in my office talking to a client." She paused here looking around the circle of six, scanning our faces for signs of attention, her eager eyes searching each deadpan slump for some shred of recognition. She went on.

"All of a sudden, we hear this scratching sound coming from behind the wall. We both stop talking, and I say, 'Do you hear that?' And he says, 'Yes. It's a rat.' 'What?' I said. 'It's a rat,' he said. 'You've got a rat in your wall.' Well, you can imagine this freaks me out, right? I hate rats. I can't bear the thought of them, and now I have to listen to one scratching behind the wall of my office all day while I'm trying to work."

She paused again.

Bobby, a hard-partying graduate student and alcoholic Xanax-head who'd been at Mobius for nearly two months per court order (three DUIs in a month), was already asleep in her sling-back. She'd heard the rat story ten times by now.

Carol looked at Bobby and frowned, but went on.

"So then, next day, I'm in with another client, and sure enough there's that scratching sound again. And I say, 'Hear that? I've got a rat in my wall.' He looked at me like I was nuts and said, 'What? Carol, that's a branch from a tree outside your window scratching against the wall in the wind.' "

Again, the dramatic pause.

"Now which explanation do you think I chose to believe?"

She looked around for the answer. Finally someone obliged and mumbled, "The branch."

"Right. The branch. And why? Because I hate rats."

Bobby twitched awake.

Katie, another early-twenties Xanax-head, snapped a picture of herself with her camera phone. There was a loud click.