The clinical psychologist, Wendy Neuman, was at least interested in Leonard’s emotional history, but he saw her only for group therapy. Gathered in the folding chairs of the meeting room, they made a diverse group with the drug-addicted, a perfect democracy of collapse. There were older white guys with M.I.A. tattoos and black dudes who played chess all day, a middle-aged female accounts clerk who drank as much as an English rugby team, and one small young woman, an aspiring singer, whose mental illness took the form of a desire to have her right leg amputated. To stimulate discussion, they passed a book around, a battered hardback with a split spine. The book was called Out of Darkness, Light and contained personal testimonies of people who had recovered from mental illnesses or had learned to cope with a chronic diagnosis. It was borderline religious while professing not to be. They sat in the unkind fluorescence of the meeting room, each reading a paragraph aloud before handing it to the next person. Some people treated the book as if it were a mysterious object. They mispronounced deity. They didn’t know what cur meant. The book was badly out of date. Some contributors referred to depression as “the blues” or “the black dog.” When the book came to him, Leonard read off his paragraph with a cadence and diction that made it clear he’d come to the hospital straight from College Hill. He was under the impression, those first days, that mental illness admitted of hierarchy, that he was a superior form of manic-depressive. If dealing with a mental illness consisted of two parts, one part medication and the other therapy, and if therapy proceeded faster the smarter you were, then many people in the group were at a disadvantage. They could barely remember what had happened in their lives, much less draw connections between events. One guy had a facial tic so pronounced that it seemed to literally shake coherent thoughts from his head. He would twitch and forget what he’d been saying. His problems were physiological, the basic wiring of his brain faulty. Listening to him was like listening to a radio tuned between channels: every so often a non sequitur came barking in. Leonard paid sympathetic attention as people spoke about their lives. He tried to take comfort in what they said. But his main thought was of how much worse off they were than he. This belief made him feel better about himself, and so he clung to it. But then it was Leonard’s turn to tell his story, and he opened his mouth and out came the most nicely modulated, well-articulated bullshit imaginable. He talked about the events that led up to his breakdown. He recited swaths of the DSM III that he’d apparently committed to memory without trying. He showed off how smart he was because that was what he was used to doing. He couldn’t stop himself.