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to trial?”
    “My time has been served,” he said.
    “No, it hasn’t,” said Jim.
    Mr. Drury could not get past his assertion that he was telling the truth and his belief that if you tell the truth you don’t go to jail. Dr. Young and Dr. Pine agreed that his inability to see things more realistically made him unable to understand the likely consequences of choosing to go to trial. For now, they agreed, he was unfit.
    Our third defendant of the day was no more the criminal mastermind of my misguided forensic fantasies than the others. A deaf-mute religious Jew, he had communicated in writing to the officers who’d arrested him that he was the terrorist Mohamed Atta, a Pakistani Nazi, and an employee ofthe Israeli secret police—the modern trinity of a disorganized mind. When Dr. Young asked, with paper and pen, how he wanted to proceed with his charges of menacing, he refused to answer. He would not acknowledge her other questions either.
    “This is very important,” she wrote to him.
    “To you it is very important,” he finally scribbled. “To me it is not.”
    She found him unfit.
    When we finished at Bellevue, Dr. Young and Dr. Pine invited me to a late lunch. We ate turkey burgers at a diner on Second Avenue along with an administrator they’d run into in the hospital lobby as we were leaving. The three gossiped about their colleagues, paying cursory homage to the idea that they shouldn’t be talking that way in front of an intern. I had no idea whom they were discussing anyway. I’d been happy to be included in their lunch plans, but I felt uncomfortable there, like a girl among men. When lunch ended, Dr. Young said we were finished for the day and that I should go home. As I left the group to take the subway back to Brooklyn alone, Dr. Young put her hand on my forearm with some urgency. “You should always carry ID,” she told me. “And if you ever get arrested, don’t say anything to the police.”

    I did jury duty once, in the 1990s, when I lived in Manhattan. The courthouses there are regal, with marble pillars and careening stairways. The Brooklyn criminal courthouse was disappointing in comparison. It looked like any modern office building. On my first morning at the court clinic, I waited before the lobby’s metal detectors, which were preventing throngs of impatient visitors from making their way to the elevator banks. Dr. Young came in and saw me waiting in thelong and slow-moving line. She motioned me toward her and a much shorter queue. “You can go in the employee entrance with your Kings County ID,” she told me. We both passed through the staff metal detector and rode the elevator together to the thirteenth floor making small talk. The sleek elevator moved quickly in response to the press of its buttons, and the spotless corridor into which we emerged was cooled by central air-conditioning. Imperious or not, it was much more pleasant than our G Building.
    “Today you’ll meet the master’s-level forensic students,” Dr. Young offered. Sometimes she sounded syrupy and like a Texan, although she was a northerner. “That will be nice for you.”
    We entered the office. It was narrow and colored in neutral tones, with a hallway that ran parallel first to a small waiting area and then to four cubicles followed by a space in the back with some chairs. Five people who looked as if they might be master’s-level students were sitting in the chairs, and after Dr. Young waved at them and entered her office—the only self-contained space in the clinic—I introduced myself as the new psychology intern. They were duly impressed. The career options for master’s-level forensic psychologists being limited, they were all contemplating doctoral programs themselves. They asked me where I went to school and wanted to know something about it. When I told them my program’s theoretical orientation was psychoanalytic, they looked at me as if waiting for a punch line. They were very young, these