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Depression’s lip, as the senescent and catatonic do, Frederick and his escort, one of the interchangeable old ladies, pass straight through the center, climbing the slope that ascends to Ingersoll. At the far side of the Depression, Frederick asks if they could pause for a cigarette, and the nurse agrees, but only if she can have one too. As Frederick leans over to offer her a light, he is careful to avoid the fresh dollop ofcow excrement deposited there, an offering from a sacred bovine.
    At the far side of the Depression, Frederick glimpses Marvin Foulds, descending from his cabin. Today, it appears, Marvin has taken perhaps his most outrageous persona, a Carmen Miranda–inspired Latin singer, supposedly named Mango Diablo. Marvin has tied a bedsheet about his slouching fifty-year-old body, tethered coconut shells over his sagging breasts, and now makes his way toward his daily meeting with Wallace by leading an imagined conga line—his fourteen other personae, perhaps? Frederick turns to the nurse, who peers at Mango, scrutinizing without apparent judgment, as if he is a television melodrama set before her.
    Frederick whistles, cigarette smoke corkscrewing from his lips.
    Geez. Talk about setting the bar
, he says.
Next time I go nuts, I’ll have to get more creative about it
.
    A fascinating case, isn’t it?
the nurse says evenly.
    Mango Diablo disappears into Upshire, and Frederick turns his attention eastward. From that height, he can see beyond the treetops, beyond the squat, complacent buildings of Belmont to the sleepy, tweedy city of Boston. Frederick thinks of when his parents drove him into Boston for the first time. He will never forget his first glimpse of it. At that distance, similar to the distance from Mayflower, the city had appeared before him as metonymy for his entire adult future: a place of human industry and sophistication waiting to receive him. But here, from this canted, elevated angle, it seems a different city.
    Frederick looks to the horizon beyond Boston’s harbor. The regal day proceeds spectacularly, unaware of the wretched throngsit passes. It was a day much like this one, every bit as obliviously flawless, three weeks before, that ended with this hospitalization. Dr. Wallace often tries to speak with Frederick of what may have led to that night: of his stresses, of his failures, of his frustrations in both marriage and career. Yes, Frederick acknowledges, perhaps they all played some role, all part of that invisible calculus of motive and explanation that we cannot ever entirely deduce. Wallace and the other men of Ingersoll have asked Frederick to recall that night many times, but the truth is that he has little to say about it. The truth is that his actions that night felt no more serious—perhaps even less serious—than those of the hundred nights that had preceded it. That night had culminated, as had so many nights, in an electric two or three hours, in which the bourbon he used to medicate his agitation conflated with the energy his agitation opened.
    In the long history of his electric states, Frederick has been seized by many notions; much of what he has thought and done has felt to him—still feels to him, even in sober states—poetic, radiant. Some nights, he would insist Katharine put on a dress, and he would take her dancing. Other nights, he would gather the men from his office for an impromptu poker game, which rapidly transformed into an impromptu concert, with him singing to them all. That night, the one with which his present is so obsessed, was merely another notion that he persists—no matter what anyone says—in finding, in a profound way, hilarious. He had been bored, with all those dull and self-righteous relatives and friends, and he had wanted to scandalize them, entertain the few among them who thrilled to such transgressions. Once, such behavior had thrilled even Katharine, hadn’t it?
    That night, drunk, he had remembered one of the most popular